Measurement of Semantic Textual Similarity in Clinical Texts: Comparison of Transformer-Based Models
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Semantic textual similarity (STS) is one of the fundamental tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Many shared tasks and corpora for STS have been organized and curated in the general English domain; however, such resources are limited in the biomedical domain. In 2019, the National NLP Clinical Challenges (n2c2) challenge developed a comprehensive clinical STS dataset and organized a community effort to solicit state-of-the-art solutions for clinical STS. OBJECTIVE: This study presents our transformer-based clinical STS models developed during this challenge as well as new models we explored after the challenge. This project is part of the 2019 n2c2/Open Health NLP shared task on clinical STS. METHODS: In this study, we explored 3 transformer-based models for clinical STS: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), XLNet, and Robustly optimized BERT approach (RoBERTa). We examined transformer models pretrained using both general English text and clinical text. We also explored using a general English STS dataset as a supplementary corpus in addition to the clinical training set developed in this challenge. Furthermore, we investigated various ensemble methods to combine different transformer models. RESULTS: Our best submission based on the XLNet model achieved the third-best performance (Pearson correlation of 0.8864) in this challenge. After the challenge, we further explored other transformer models and improved the performance to 0.9065 using a RoBERTa model, which outperformed the best-performing system developed in this challenge (Pearson correlation of 0.9010). CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrated the efficiency of utilizing transformer-based models to measure semantic similarity for clinical text. Our models can be applied to clinical applications such as clinical text deduplication and summarization.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it