Maha Alkhairy

Maha Alkhairy, Vincent Homer, Brendan O'Connor

We develop a system for solving logical deduction one-dimensional ordering problems by transforming natural language premises and candidate statements into first-order logic. Building on Heim and Kratzer's syntax-based compositional semantic rules which utilizes lambda calculus, we develop a semantic parsing algorithm with abstract types, templated rules, and a dynamic component for interpreting entities within a context constructed from the input. The resulting logical forms are executed via constraint logic programming to determine which candidate statements can be logically deduced from the premises. The symbolic system, the Formal Semantic Logic Inferer (FSLI), provides a formally grounded, linguistically driven system for natural language logical deduction. We evaluate it on both synthetic and derived logical deduction problems. FSLI achieves 100% accuracy on BIG-bench's logical deduction task and 88% on a syntactically simplified subset of AR-LSAT outperforming an LLM baseline, o1-preview. While current research in natural language reasoning emphasizes neural language models, FSLI highlights the potential of principled, interpretable systems for symbolic logical deduction in NLP.

Maha Alkhairy

This paper proposes a deep learning-based method to identify the segments of a clinical note corresponding to ICD-9 broad categories which are further color-coded with respect to 17 ICD-9 categories. The proposed Medical Segment Colorer (MSC) architecture is a pipeline framework that works in three stages: (1) word categorization, (2) phrase allocation, and (3) document classification. MSC uses gated recurrent unit neural networks (GRUs) to map from an input document to word multi-labels to phrase allocations, and uses statistical median to map phrase allocation to document multi-label. We compute variable length segment coloring from overlapping phrase allocation probabilities. These cross-level bidirectional contextual links identify adaptive context and then produce segment coloring. We train and evaluate MSC using the document labeled MIMIC-III clinical notes. Training is conducted solely using document multi-labels without any information on phrases, segments, or words. In addition to coloring a clinical note, MSC generates as byproducts document multi-labeling and word tagging -- creation of ICD9 category keyword lists based on segment coloring. Performance comparison of MSC byproduct document multi-labels versus methods whose purpose is to produce justifiable document multi-labels is 64% vs 52.4% micro-average F1-score against the CAML (CNN attention multi label) method. For evaluation of MSC segment coloring results, medical practitioners independently assigned the colors to broad ICD9 categories given a sample of 40 colored notes and a sample of 50 words related to each category based on the word tags. Binary scoring of this evaluation has a median value of 83.3% and mean of 63.7%.