Neural Query Synthesis and Domain-Specific Ranking Templates for Multi-Stage Clinical Trial Matching
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this work, we propose an effective multi-stage neural ranking system for the clinical trial matching problem. First, we introduce NQS, a neural query synthesis method that leverages a zero-shot document expansion model to generate multiple sentence-long queries from lengthy patient descriptions. These queries are independently issued to a search engine and the results are fused. We find that on the TREC 2021 Clinical Trials Track, this method outperforms strong traditional baselines like BM25 and BM25 + RM3 by about 12 points in [email protected], a relative improvement of 34%. This simple method is so effective that even a state-of-the-art neural relevance ranking method trained on the medical subset of MS MARCO passage, when reranking the results of NQS, fails to improve on the ranked list. Second, we introduce a two-stage neural reranking pipeline trained on clinical trial matching data using tailored ranking templates. In this setting, we can train a pointwise reranker using just 1.1k positive examples and obtain effectiveness improvements over NQS by 24 points. This end-to-end multi-stage system demonstrates a 20% relative effectiveness gain compared to the second-best submission at TREC 2021, making it an important step towards better automated clinical trial matching.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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