Ireland

A wealth of important clinical information lies untouched in the Electronic Health Record, often in the form of unstructured textual documents. For patients with Epilepsy, such information includes outcome measures like Seizure Frequency and Dates of Last Seizure, key parameters that guide all therapy for these patients. Transformer models have been able to extract such outcome measures from unstructured clinical note text as sentences with human-like accuracy; however, these sentences are not yet usable in a quantitative analysis for large-scale studies. In this study, we developed a pipeline to quantify these outcome measures. We used text summarization models to convert unstructured sentences into specific formats, and then employed rules-based quantifiers to calculate seizure frequencies and dates of last seizure. We demonstrated that our pipeline of models does not excessively propagate errors and we analyzed its mistakes. We anticipate that our methods can be generalized outside of epilepsy to other disorders to drive large-scale clinical research.

ACL 2022

Quantifying Clinical Outcome Measures in Patients with Epilepsy Using the Electronic Health Record

timex normalization

time expressions

electronic health record

epilepsy

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

workshop paper

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

Biomedical relation extraction, aiming to automatically discover high-quality and semantic relations between the entities from free text, is becoming a vital step for automated knowledge discovery. Pretrained language models have achieved impressive performance on various natural language processing tasks, including relation extraction. In this paper, we perform extensive empirical comparisons of encoder-only transformers with the encoder-decoder transformer, specifically T5, on ten public biomedical relation extraction datasets. We study the relation extraction task from four major biomedical tasks, namely chemical-protein relation extraction, disease-protein relation extraction, drug-drug interaction, and protein-protein interaction. We also explore the use of multi-task fine-tuning to investigate the correlation among major biomedical relation extraction tasks. We
report performance (micro F-score) using T5, BioBERT and PubMedBERT, demonstrating that T5 and multi-task learning can improve the performance of the biomedical relation extraction task.

Comparing Encoder-Only and Encoder-Decoder Transformers for Relation Extraction from Biomedical Texts: An Empirical Study on Ten Benchmark Datasets

Electronic health records contain valuable information about symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and outcomes of the treatments of individual patients. However, the records may also contain information that can reveal the identity of the patients. Removing these identifiers - the Protected Health Information (PHI) - can protect the identity of the patient. Automatic de-identification is a process which employs machine learning techniques to detect and remove PHI. However, automatic techniques are imperfect in their precision and introduce noise into the data. This study examines the impact of this noise on the utility of Swedish de-identified clinical data by using human evaluators and by training and testing BERT models. Our results indicate that de-identification does not harm the utility for clinical NLP and that human evaluators are less sensitive to noise from de-identification than expected.

Utility Preservation of Clinical Text After De-Identification

Medical document coding is the process of assigning labels from a structured label space (ontology – e.g., ICD-9) to medical documents. This process is laborious, costly, and error-prone. In recent years, efforts have been made to automate this process with neural models. The label spaces are large (in the order of thousands of labels) and follow a big-head long-tail label distribution, giving rise to few-shot and zero-shot scenarios. Previous efforts tried to address these scenarios within the model, leading to improvements on rare labels, but worse results on frequent ones. We propose data augmentation and synthesis techniques in order to address these scenarios. We further introduce an analysis technique for this setting inspired by confusion matrices. This analysis technique points to the positive impact of data augmentation and synthesis, but also highlights more general issues of confusion within families of codes, and underprediction.

Horses to Zebras: Ontology-Guided Data Augmentation and Synthesis for ICD-9 Coding

Conversational bots have become nontraditional methods for therapy among
individuals suffering from psychological illnesses. Leveraging deep neural generative
language models, we propose a deep trainable neural conversational model for therapyoriented response generation. We leverage transfer learning methods during training on therapy and counseling based data from Reddit and AlexanderStreet. This was done to adapt existing generative models – GPT2 and DIALOGPT – to the task of automated dialog generation. Through quantitative evaluation of the linguistic quality, we observe that the dialog generation model - DIALOGPT (345M) with transfer learning on video data attains scores similar to a human response baseline. However, human evaluation of responses by conversational bots show mostly signs of generic advice or information sharing instead of therapeutic interaction.

Conversational Bots for Psychotherapy: A Study of Generative Transformer Models Using Domain-specific Dialogues

Antibiotic resistance has become a growing worldwide concern as new resistance mechanisms are emerging and spreading globally, and thus detecting and collecting the cause – Antibiotic Resistance Genes (ARGs), have been more critical than ever. In this work, we aim to automate the curation of ARGs by extracting ARG-related assertive statements from scientific papers. To support the research towards this direction, we build SCIARG, a new benchmark dataset containing 2,000 manually annotated statements as the evaluation set and 12,516 silver-standard training statements that are automatically created from scientific papers by a set of rules. To set up the baseline performance on SCIARG, we exploit three state-of-the-art neural architectures based on pre-trained language models and prompt tuning, and further ensemble them to attain the highest 77.0% F-score. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to leverage natural language processing techniques to curate all validated ARGs from scientific papers. Both the code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/VT-NLP/SciARG

Towards Automatic Curation of Antibiotic Resistance Genes via Statement Extraction from Scientific Papers: A Benchmark Dataset and Models

It is commonly claimed that inter-annotator agreement (IAA) is the ceiling of machine learning (ML) performance, i.e., that the agreement between an ML system’s predictions and an annotator can not be higher than the agreement between two annotators. Although Boguslav and Cohen (2017) showed that this claim is falsified by many real-world ML systems, the claim has persisted. As a complement to this real-world evidence, we conducted a comprehensive set of simulations, and show that an ML model can outperform IAA even if (and especially if) annotators are noisy and differ in their underlying classification functions, as long as the ML model is reasonably well-specified. Although the latter condition has long been elusive, leading ML models to underperform IAA, we anticipate that this condition will be increasingly met in the era of big data and deep learning. Our work has implications for (1) maximizing the value of machine learning, (2) adherence to ethical standards in computing, and (3) economical use of annotated resources, which is paramount in settings where annotation is especially expensive, like biomedical natural language processing.

Inter-annotator agreement is not the ceiling of machine learning performance: Evidence from a comprehensive set of simulations

Machine learning models that offer excellent predictive performance often lack the interpretability necessary to support integrated human machine decision-making. In clinical medicine and other high-risk settings, domain experts may be unwilling to trust model predictions without explanations. Work in explainable AI must balance competing objectives along two different axes: 1) Models should ideally be both accurate and simple. 2) Explanations must balance faithfulness to the model's decision-making with their plausibility to a domain expert. We propose to use knowledge distillation, or training a student model that mimics the behavior of a trained teacher model, as a technique to generate faithful and plausible explanations. We evaluate our approach on the task of assigning ICD codes to clinical notes to demonstrate that the student model is faithful to the teacher model's behavior and produces quality natural language explanations.

Model Distillation for Faithful Explanations of Medical Code Predictions


Recognizing causal precedence relations among the chemical interactions in biomedical literature is crucial to understanding the underlying biological mechanisms. 
However, detecting such causal relation can be hard because: 
(1) many times, such causal relations among events are not explicitly expressed by certain phrases but implicitly implied by very diverse expressions in the text, and (2) annotating such causal relation detection datasets requires considerable expert knowledge and effort.
In this paper, we propose a strategy to address both challenges by training neural models with in-domain pre-training and knowledge distillation. We show that, by using very limited amount of labeled data, and sufficient amount of unlabeled data, the neural models outperform previous baselines on the causal precedence detection task, and are ten times faster at inference compared to the BERT base model.


Low Resource Causal Event Detection from Biomedical Literature

This paper proposes novel drug-protein relation extraction models that indirectly utilize distant supervision data. Concretely, instead of adding distant supervision data to the manually annotated training data, our models incorporate distantly supervised models that are relation extraction models trained with distant supervision data. Distantly supervised learning has been proposed to generate a large amount of pseudo-training data at low cost. However, there is still a problem of low prediction performance due to the inclusion of mislabeled data. Therefore, several methods have been proposed to suppress the effects of noisy cases by utilizing some manually annotated training data. However, their performance is lower than that of supervised learning on manually annotated data because mislabeled data that cannot be fully suppressed becomes noise when training the model. To overcome this issue, our methods indirectly utilize distant supervision data with manually annotated training data. The experimental results on the DrugProt corpus in the BioCreative VII Track 1 showed that our proposed model can consistently improve the supervised models in different settings.

Improving Supervised Drug-Protein Relation Extraction with Distantly Supervised Models

Cancer immunology research involves several important cell and protein factors. Extracting the information of such cells and proteins and the interactions between them from text are crucial in text mining for cancer immunology research. However, there are few available datasets for these entities, and the amount of annotated documents is not sufficient compared with other major named entity types. In this work, we introduce our automatically annotated dataset of key named entities, i.e., T-cells, cytokines, and transcription factors, which engages the recent cancer immunotherapy. The entities are annotated based on the UniProtKB knowledge base using dictionary matching. We build a neural named entity recognition (NER) model to be trained on this dataset and evaluate it on a manually-annotated data. Experimental results show that we can achieve a promising NER performance even though our data is automatically annotated. Our dataset also enhances the NER performance when combined with existing data, especially gaining improvement in yet investigated named entities such as cytokines and transcription factors.

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Next from ACL 2022

Comparing Encoder-Only and Encoder-Decoder Transformers for Relation Extraction from Biomedical Texts: An Empirical Study on Ten Benchmark Datasets

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