Advancing Clinical Natural Language Processing through Knowledge-Infused Language Models
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Date
2024-01-09
Authors
Lu, Qiuhao
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have shown remarkable success in general-domain text tasks, but their application in the clinical domain is constrained by specialized language, terminology, and a lack of in-depth understanding of scientific and medical knowledge. As the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and intricate clinical documents continues to grow, the need for domain-adapted PLMs in healthcare research and applications becomes increasingly vital. This research proposes innovative strategies to address these challenges, integrating domain-specific knowledge into PLMs to enhance their efficacy in healthcare. Our approach includes (i) fine-tuning models with knowledge graphs and domain-specific textual data, using graph representation learning and data augmentation techniques, and (ii) directly injecting domain knowledge into PLMs through the use of adapters. By employing these methods, the study aims to improve the performance of clinical language models in tasks such as interpreting EHRs, extracting information from clinical documents, and predicting patient outcomes. The advancements achieved in this work hold the potential to significantly influence the field of clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) and contribute to improved patient care and healthcare innovation.
Description
Keywords
Clinical NLP, Knowledge Integration, Language Models, Natural Language Processing