Canada

Assessing the capacity of numerical understanding of vision-and-language models over images and texts is crucial for real vision-and-language applications, such as systems for automated medical image analysis. We provide a visual reasoning dataset focusing on numerical understanding in the medical domain. The experiments using our dataset show that current vision-and-language models fail to perform numerical inference in the medical domain. However, the data augmentation with only a small amount of our dataset improves the model performance, while maintaining the performance in the general domain.

ACL 2023

Medical Visual Textual Entailment for Numerical Understanding of Vision-and-Language Models

visual textual entailment

medical texts

numerical reasoning

multimodal

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
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Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

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.

Valuable datasets that contain sensitive information are not shared due to privacy and copyright concerns. This hinders progress in many areas and prevents the use of machine learning solutions to solve relevant tasks. One possible solution is sharing models that are trained on such datasets. However, this is also associated with potential privacy risks due to data extraction attacks. In this work, we propose a solution based on sharing parts of the model's parameters, and using a proxy dataset for complimentary knowledge transfer. Our experiments show encouraging results, and reduced risk to potential training data identification attacks. We present a viable solution to sharing knowledge with data-disadvantaged parties, that do not have the resources to produce high-quality data, with reduced privacy risks to the sharing parties. We make our code publicly available.

Privacy-Preserving Knowledge Transfer through Partial Parameter Sharing

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects cognitive abilities and memory, especially in older adults. One of the challenges of AD is that it can be difficult to diagnose in its early stages. However, recent research has shown that changes in language, including speech decline and difficulty in processing information, can be important indicators of AD and may help with early detection. Hence, the speech narratives of the patients can be useful in diagnosing the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. While the previous works have presented the potential of using speech narratives to diagnose AD in high-resource languages, this work explores the possibility of using a low-resourced language, i.e., Hindi language, to diagnose AD. In this paper, we present a dataset specifically for analyzing AD in the Hindi language, along with experimental results using various state-of-the-art algorithms to assess the diagnostic potential of speech narratives in Hindi. Our analysis suggests that speech narratives in the Hindi language have the potential to aid in the diagnosis of AD. Our dataset and code are made publicly available at https://github.com/rkritesh210/DementiaBankHindi. 


Breaking Barriers: Exploring the Diagnostic Potential of Speech Narratives in Hindi for Alzheimer's Disease

Massively multilingual pre-trained language models (MMPLMs) are developed in recent years demonstrating superpowers and the pre-knowledge they acquire for downstream tasks. This work investigates whether MMPLMs can be applied to clinical domain machine translation (MT) towards entirely unseen languages via transfer learning. We carry out an experimental investigation using Meta-AI's MMPLMs ``wmt21-dense-24-wide-en-X and X-en (WMT21fb)'' which were pre-trained on 7 language pairs and 14 translation directions including English to Czech, German, Hausa, Icelandic, Japanese, Russian, and Chinese, and the opposite direction. We fine-tune these MMPLMs towards English-\textit{Spanish} language pair which \textit{did not exist at all} in their original pre-trained corpora both implicitly and explicitly. We prepare carefully aligned \textit{clinical} domain data for this fine-tuning, which is different from their original mixed domain knowledge. Our experimental result shows that the fine-tuning is very successful using just 250k well-aligned in-domain EN-ES segments for three sub-task translation testings: clinical cases, clinical terms, and ontology concepts. It achieves very close evaluation scores to another MMPLM NLLB from Meta-AI, which included Spanish as a high-resource setting in the pre-training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on using MMPLMs towards \textit{clinical domain transfer-learning NMT} successfully for totally unseen languages during pre-training.


Investigating Massive Multilingual Pre-Trained Machine Translation Models for Clinical Domain via Transfer Learning

The Coronavirus pandemic has heightened the demand for technological solutions capable of gathering and monitoring data automatically, quickly, and securely. To achieve this need, the Plantão Coronavirus chatbot has been made available to the population of Ceará State in Brazil. This chatbot employs automated symptom detection technology through Natural Language Processing (NLP). The proposal of this work is a symptom tracker, which is a neural network that processes texts and captures symptoms in messages exchanged between citizens of the state and the Plantão Coronavirus nurse/doctor, i.e., clinical conversations. The model has the ability to recognize new patterns and has identified a high incidence of altered psychological behaviors, including anguish, anxiety, and sadness, among users who tested positive or negative for Covid-19. As a result, the tool has emphasized the importance of expanding coverage through community mental health services in the state.

Tracking the Evolution of Covid-19 Symptoms through Clinical Conversations

Pretrained language models leverage self-supervised learning to use large amounts of unlabeled text for learning contextual representations of sequences. However, in the domain of medical conversations, the availability of large, public datasets is limited due to issues of privacy and data management. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of dialog-aware pretraining objectives and multiphase training in using unlabeled data to improve LMs training for medical utterance classification. The objectives of pretraining for dialog awareness involve tasks that take into account the structure of conversations, including features such as turn-taking and the roles of speakers. The multiphase training process uses unannotated data in a sequence that prioritizes similarities and connections between different domains. We empirically evaluate these methods on conversational dialog classification tasks in the medical and counseling domains, and find that multiphase training can help achieve higher performance than standard pretraining or finetuning.

Navigating Data Scarcity: Pretraining for Medical Utterance Classification

In developing countries like India, doctors and healthcare professionals working in public health spend significant time answering health queries that are fact-based and repetitive. Therefore, we propose an automated way to answer maternal and child health-related queries. A database of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and their corresponding answers generated by experts is curated from rural health workers and young mothers. We develop a Hindi chatbot that identifies k relevant Question and Answer (QnA) pairs from the database in response to a healthcare query (q) written in Devnagri script or Hindi-English (Hinglish) code-mixed script. The curated database covers 80% of all the queries that a user of our study is likely to ask. We experimented with (i) rule-based methods, (ii) sentence embeddings, and (iii) a paraphrasing classifier, to calculate the q-Q similarity. We observed that paraphrasing classifier gives the best result when trained first on an open-domain text and then on the healthcare domain. Our chatbot uses an ensemble of all three approaches. We observed that if a given q can be answered using the database, then our chatbot can provide at least one relevant QnA pair among its top three suggestions for up to 70% of the queries.

Hindi Chatbot for Supporting Maternal and Child Health Related Queries in Rural India

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a promising direction for augmenting clinical diagnostic decision support and reducing diagnostic errors, a leading contributor to medical errors. To further the development of clinical AI systems, the Diagnostic Reasoning Benchmark (DR.BENCH) was introduced as a comprehensive generative AI framework, comprised of six tasks representing key components in clinical reasoning. We present a comparative analysis of in-domain versus out-of-domain language models as well as multi-task versus single task training with a focus on the problem summarization task in DR.BENCH (Gao et al., 2023). We demonstrate that a multi-task, clinically trained language model outperforms its general domain counterpart by a large margin, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance, with a ROUGE-L score of 28.55. This research underscores the value of domain-specific training for optimizing clinical diagnostic reasoning tasks.

Multi-Task Training with In-Domain Language Models for Diagnostic Reasoning

Accurately capturing medication history is crucial in delivering high-quality medical care. The extraction of medication events from unstructured clinical notes, however, is challenging because the information is presented in complex narratives. We address this challenge by leveraging the newly released Contextualized Medication Event Dataset (CMED) as part of our participation in the 2022 National NLP Clinical Challenges (n2c2) shared task. Our study evaluates the performance of various pretrained language models in this task. Further, we find that data augmentation coupled with domain-specific training provides notable improvements. With experiments, we also underscore the importance of careful data preprocessing in medical event detection.

Context-aware Medication Event Extraction from Unstructured Text

In the medical field, there are many clinical texts such as electronic medical records, and research on Japanese natural language processing using these texts has been conducted. One such research involves Recognizing Textual
Entailment (RTE) in clinical texts using a semantic analysis and logical inference system, ccg2lambda. However, it is difficult for existing inference systems to correctly determine the entailment relations, if the input sentence contains medical domain specific paraphrases such as disease names. In this study, we pro-
pose a method to supplement the equivalence relations of disease names as axioms by identifying candidates for paraphrases that lack in theorem proving. Candidates of paraphrases are identified by using a model for the NER task for disease names and a disease name dictionary. We also construct an inference test set that requires knowledge injection of disease names and evaluate our inference system. Experiments showed that our inference system was able to correctly infer for 106 out of 149 inference test sets.

Knowledge Injection for Disease Names in Logical Inference between Japanese Clinical Texts

This work introduces a novel three-class annotation scheme for text-based dementia classification in patients, based on their recorded visit interactions. Multiple models were developed utilising BERT, RoBERTa and DistilBERT. Two approaches were employed to improve the representation of dementia samples: oversampling the underrepresented data points in the original Pitt dataset and combining the Pitt with the Holland and Kempler datasets. The DistilBERT models trained on either an oversampled Pitt dataset or the combined dataset performed best in classifying the dementia class. Specifically, the model trained on the oversampled Pitt dataset and the one trained on the combined dataset obtained state-of-the-art performance with 98.8% overall accuracy and 98.6% macro-averaged F1-score, respectively. The models' outputs were manually inspected through saliency highlighting, using Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME), to provide a better understanding of its predictions.

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Privacy-Preserving Knowledge Transfer through Partial Parameter Sharing

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