United States

Neural image-to-text radiology report generation systems offer the potential to improve radiology reporting by reducing the repetitive process of report drafting and identifying possible medical errors. However, existing report generation systems, despite achieving high performances on natural language generation metrics such as CIDEr or BLEU, still suffer from incomplete and inconsistent generations. Here we introduce two new simple rewards to encourage the generation of factually complete and consistent radiology reports: one that encourages the system to generate radiology domain entities consistent with the reference, and one that uses natural language inference to encourage these entities to be described in inferentially consistent ways. We combine these with the novel use of an existing semantic equivalence metric (BERTScore). We further propose a report generation system that optimizes these rewards via reinforcement learning. On two open radiology report datasets, our system substantially improved the F1 score of a clinical information extraction performance by +22.1 (∆+63.9%). We further show via a human evaluation and a qualitative analysis that our system leads to generations that are more factually complete and consistent compared to the baselines.

NAACL 2021

Improving Factual Completeness and Consistency of Image-to-Text Radiology Report Generation

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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technical paper

Knowledge-intensive tasks such as question answering often require assimilating information from different sections of large inputs such as books or article collections. We propose ReadTwice, a simple and effective technique that combines several strengths of prior approaches to model long-range dependencies with Transformers. The main idea is to read text in small segments, in parallel, summarizing each segment into a memory table to be used in a second read of the text. We show that the method outperforms models of comparable size on several question answering (QA) datasets and sets a new state of the art on the challenging NarrativeQA task, with questions about entire books.

ReadTwice: Reading Very Large Documents with Memories

Natural-language prompts have recently been used to coax pretrained language models into performing other AI tasks, using a fill-in-the-blank paradigm (Petroni et al., 2019) or a few-shot extrapolation paradigm (Brown et al., 2020). For example, language models retain factual knowledge from their training corpora that can be extracted by asking them to ``fill in the blank'' in a sentential prompt. However, where does this prompt come from? We explore the idea of learning prompts by gradient descent---either fine-tuning prompts taken from previous work, or starting from random initialization. Our prompts consist of ``soft words,'' i.e., continuous vectors that are not necessarily word type embeddings from the language model. Furthermore, for each task, we optimize a mixture of prompts, learning which prompts are most effective and how to ensemble them. Across multiple English LMs and tasks, our approach hugely outperforms previous methods, showing that the implicit factual knowledge in language models was previously underestimated. Moreover, this knowledge is cheap to elicit: random initialization is nearly as good as informed initialization.

Learning How to Ask: Querying LMs with Mixtures of Soft Prompts

Due to the excessive cost of large-scale language model pre-training, considerable efforts have been made to train BERT progressively -- start from an inferior but low-cost model and gradually grow the model to increase the computational complexity. Our objective is to advance the understanding of Transformer growth and discover principles that guide progressive training. First, we find that similar to network architecture search, Transformer growth also favors compound scaling. Specifically, while existing methods only conduct network growth in a single dimension, we observe that it is beneficial to use compound growth operators and balance multiple dimensions (e.g., depth, width, and input length of the model). Moreover, we explore alternative growth operators in each dimension via controlled comparison to give operator selection practical guidance. In light of our analyses, the proposed method speeds up BERT pre-training by 73.6% and 82.2% for the base and large models respectively, while achieving comparable performances.

On the Transformer Growth for Progressive BERT Training

Standard autoregressive language models perform only polynomial-time computation to compute the probability of the next symbol. While this is attractive, it means they cannot model distributions whose next-symbol probability is \emph{hard} to compute. Indeed, they cannot even model them well enough to solve associated \emph{easy} decision problems for which an engineer might want to consult a language model. These limitations apply no matter how much computation and data are used to train the model, unless the model is given access to oracle parameters that grow \emph{superpolynomially} in sequence length.

Limitations of Autoregressive Models and Their Alternatives

We study how masking and predicting tokens in an unsupervised fashion can give rise to linguistic structures and downstream performance gains. Recent theories have suggested that pretrained language models acquire useful inductive biases through masks that implicitly act as cloze reductions for downstream tasks. While appealing, we show that the success of the random masking strategy used in practice cannot be explained by such cloze-like masks alone. We construct cloze-like masks using task-specific lexicons for three different classification datasets and show that the majority of pretrained performance gains come from generic masks that are not associated with the lexicon. To explain the empirical success of these generic masks, we demonstrate a correspondence between the Masked Language Model (MLM) objective and existing methods for learning statistical dependencies in graphical models. Using this, we derive a method for extracting these learned statistical dependencies in MLMs and show that these dependencies encode useful inductive biases in the form of syntactic structures. In an unsupervised parsing evaluation, simply forming a minimum spanning tree on the implied statistical dependence structure outperforms a classic method for unsupervised parsing (58.74 vs. 55.91 UUAS).

On the Inductive Bias of Masked Language Modeling: From Statistical to Syntactic Dependencies

We present a method for generating comparative summaries that highlights similarities and contradictions in input documents. The key challenge in creating such summaries is the lack of large parallel training data required for training typical summarization systems. To this end, we introduce a hybrid generation approach inspired by traditional concept-to-text systems. To enable accurate comparison between different sources, the model first learns to extract pertinent relations from input documents. The content planning component uses deterministic operators to aggregate these relations after identifying a subset for inclusion into a summary. The surface realization component lexicalizes this information using a text-infilling language model. By separately modeling content selection and realization, we can effectively train them with limited annotations. We implemented and tested the model in the domain of nutrition and health -- rife with inconsistencies. Compared to conventional methods, our framework leads to more faithful, relevant and aggregation-sensitive summarization -- while being equally fluent.

Nutribullets Hybrid: Multi-document Health Summarization

We introduce AVA, an automatic evaluation approach for Question Answering, which given a set of questions associated with Gold Standard answers (references), can estimate system Accuracy. AVA uses Transformer-based language models to encode question, answer, and reference texts. This allows for effectively assessing answer correctness using similarity between the reference and an automatic answer, biased towards the question semantics. To design, train, and test AVA, we built multiple large training, development, and test sets on public and industrial benchmarks. Our innovative solutions achieve up to 74.7% F1 score in predicting human judgment for single answers. Additionally, AVA can be used to evaluate the overall system Accuracy with an error lower than 7% at 95% of confidence when measured on several QA systems.

AVA: an Automatic eValuation Approach for Question Answering Systems

In many natural language processing applications, identifying predictive text can be as important as the predictions themselves. When predicting medical diagnoses, for example, identifying predictive content in clinical notes not only enhances interpretability, but also allows unknown, descriptive (i.e., text-based) risk factors to be identified. We here formalize this problem as predictive extraction and address it using a simple mechanism based on linear attention. Our method preserves differentiability, allowing scalable inference via stochastic gradient descent. Further, the model decomposes predictions into a sum of contributions of distinct text spans. Importantly, we require only document labels, not ground-truth spans. Results show that our model identifies semantically-cohesive spans and assigns them scores that agree with human ratings, while preserving classification performance.

SpanPredict: Extraction of Predictive Document Spans with Neural Attention

A prevailing paradigm in neural text generation is one-shot generation, where text is produced in a single step. The one-shot setting is inadequate, however, when the constraints the user wishes to impose on the generated text are dynamic, especially when authoring longer documents. We address this limitation with an interactive text generation setting in which the user interacts with the system by issuing commands to edit existing text. To this end, we propose a novel text editing task, and introduce WikiDocEdits, a dataset of single-sentence edits extracted from Wikipedia revision histories. We show that our Interactive Editor, a transformer-based model trained on this dataset, outperforms baselines and obtains positive results in both automatic and human evaluations. We present empirical and qualitative analyses of this model's performance.

Text Editing by Command

We consider the task of linking social media

Improving Factual Completeness and Consistency of Image-to-Text Radiology Report Generation

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