Shweta Yadav

Shweta Yadav, Deepak Gupta, Dina Demner-Fushman

The quest for seeking health information has swamped the web with consumers' health-related questions. Generally, consumers use overly descriptive and peripheral information to express their medical condition or other healthcare needs, contributing to the challenges of natural language understanding. One way to address this challenge is to summarize the questions and distill the key information of the original question. To address this issue, we introduce a new dataset, CHQ-Summ that contains 1507 domain-expert annotated consumer health questions and corresponding summaries. The dataset is derived from the community question-answering forum and therefore provides a valuable resource for understanding consumer health-related posts on social media. We benchmark the dataset on multiple state-of-the-art summarization models to show the effectiveness of the dataset.

Abhishek Basu, Deepak Gupta, Dina Demner-Fushman et al.

The quest for seeking health information has swamped the web with consumers health-related questions. Generally, consumers use overly descriptive and peripheral information to express their medical condition or other healthcare needs, contributing to the challenges of natural language understanding. One way to address this challenge is to summarize the questions and distill the key information of the original question. Recently, large-scale datasets have significantly propelled the development of several summarization tasks, such as multi-document summarization and dialogue summarization. However, a lack of a domain-expert annotated dataset for the consumer healthcare questions summarization task inhibits the development of an efficient summarization system. To address this issue, we introduce a new dataset, CHQ-Sum,m that contains 1507 domain-expert annotated consumer health questions and corresponding summaries. The dataset is derived from the community question answering forum and therefore provides a valuable resource for understanding consumer health-related posts on social media. We benchmark the dataset on multiple state-of-the-art summarization models to show the effectiveness of the dataset

Shweta Yadav, Vishal Pallagani, Amit Sheth

One of the cardinal tasks in achieving robust medical question answering systems is textual entailment. The existing approaches make use of an ensemble of pre-trained language models or data augmentation, often to clock higher numbers on the validation metrics. However, two major shortcomings impede higher success in identifying entailment: (1) understanding the focus/intent of the question and (2) ability to utilize the real-world background knowledge to capture the context beyond the sentence. In this paper, we present a novel Medical Knowledge-Enriched Textual Entailment framework that allows the model to acquire a semantic and global representation of the input medical text with the help of a relevant domain-specific knowledge graph. We evaluate our framework on the benchmark MEDIQA-RQE dataset and manifest that the use of knowledge enriched dual-encoding mechanism help in achieving an absolute improvement of 8.27% over SOTA language models. We have made the source code available here.

Rohan Charudatt Salvi, Chirag Chawla, Dhruv Jain et al.

Automatic medical text simplification plays a key role in improving health literacy by making complex biomedical research accessible to diverse readers. However, most existing resources assume a single generic audience, overlooking the wide variation in medical literacy and information needs across user groups. To address this limitation, we introduce PERCS (Persona-guided Controllable Summarization), a dataset of biomedical abstracts paired with summaries tailored to four personas: Laypersons, Premedical Students, Non-medical Researchers, and Medical Experts. These personas represent different levels of medical literacy and information needs, emphasizing the need for targeted, audience-specific summarization. Each summary in PERCS was reviewed by physicians for factual accuracy and persona alignment using a detailed error taxonomy. Technical validation shows clear differences in readability, vocabulary, and content depth across personas. Along with describing the dataset, we benchmark four large language models on PERCS using automatic evaluation metrics that assess comprehensiveness, readability, and faithfulness, establishing baseline results for future research. The dataset, annotation guidelines, and evaluation materials are publicly available to support research on persona-specific communication and controllable biomedical summarization.

Siddhant Agarwal, Adya Dhuler, Polly Ruhnke et al.

Over the past years, memes have evolved from being exclusively a medium of humorous exchanges to one that allows users to express a range of emotions freely and easily. With the ever-growing utilization of memes in expressing depressive sentiments, we conduct a study on identifying depressive symptoms exhibited by memes shared by users of online social media platforms. We introduce RESTOREx as a vital resource for detecting depressive symptoms in memes on social media through the Large Language Model (LLM) generated and human-annotated explanations. We introduce MAMAMemeia, a collaborative multi-agent multi-aspect discussion framework grounded in the clinical psychology method of Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) Competencies. MAMAMemeia improves upon the current state-of-the-art by 7.55% in macro-F1 and is established as the new benchmark compared to over 30 methods.

Rochana Chaturvedi, Abari Bhattacharya, Shweta Yadav

Community Question-Answering (CQA) forums have revolutionized how people seek information, especially those related to their healthcare needs, placing their trust in the collective wisdom of the public. However, there can be several answers in response to a single query, which makes it hard to grasp the key information related to the specific health concern. Typically, CQA forums feature a single top-voted answer as a representative summary for each query. However, a single answer overlooks the alternative solutions and other information frequently offered in other responses. Our research focuses on aspect-based summarization of health answers to address this limitation. Summarization of responses under different aspects such as suggestions, information, personal experiences, and questions can enhance the usability of the platforms. We formalize a multi-stage annotation guideline and contribute a unique dataset comprising aspect-based human-written health answer summaries. We build an automated multi-faceted answer summarization pipeline with this dataset based on task-specific fine-tuning of several state-of-the-art models. The pipeline leverages question similarity to retrieve relevant answer sentences, subsequently classifying them into the appropriate aspect type. Following this, we employ several recent abstractive summarization models to generate aspect-based summaries. Finally, we present a comprehensive human analysis and find that our summaries rank high in capturing relevant content and a wide range of solutions.

Yue Zhou, Barbara Di Eugenio, Brian Ziebart et al.

Health coaching helps patients identify and accomplish lifestyle-related goals, effectively improving the control of chronic diseases and mitigating mental health conditions. However, health coaching is cost-prohibitive due to its highly personalized and labor-intensive nature. In this paper, we propose to build a dialogue system that converses with the patients, helps them create and accomplish specific goals, and can address their emotions with empathy. However, building such a system is challenging since real-world health coaching datasets are limited and empathy is subtle. Thus, we propose a modularized health coaching dialogue system with simplified NLU and NLG frameworks combined with mechanism-conditioned empathetic response generation. Through automatic and human evaluation, we show that our system generates more empathetic, fluent, and coherent responses and outperforms the state-of-the-art in NLU tasks while requiring less annotation. We view our approach as a key step towards building automated and more accessible health coaching systems.

Abdullah Mazhar, Zuhair hasan shaik, Aseem Srivastava et al. · microsoft-research

The expression of mental health symptoms through non-traditional means, such as memes, has gained remarkable attention over the past few years, with users often highlighting their mental health struggles through figurative intricacies within memes. While humans rely on commonsense knowledge to interpret these complex expressions, current Multimodal Language Models (MLMs) struggle to capture these figurative aspects inherent in memes. To address this gap, we introduce a novel dataset, AxiOM, derived from the GAD anxiety questionnaire, which categorizes memes into six fine-grained anxiety symptoms. Next, we propose a commonsense and domain-enriched framework, M3H, to enhance MLMs' ability to interpret figurative language and commonsense knowledge. The overarching goal remains to first understand and then classify the mental health symptoms expressed in memes. We benchmark M3H against 6 competitive baselines (with 20 variations), demonstrating improvements in both quantitative and qualitative metrics, including a detailed human evaluation. We observe a clear improvement of 4.20% and 4.66% on weighted-F1 metric. To assess the generalizability, we perform extensive experiments on a public dataset, RESTORE, for depressive symptom identification, presenting an extensive ablation study that highlights the contribution of each module in both datasets. Our findings reveal limitations in existing models and the advantage of employing commonsense to enhance figurative understanding.

Gauri Naik, Sharad Chandakacherla, Shweta Yadav et al.

Healthcare Community Question Answering (CQA) forums offer an accessible platform for individuals seeking information on various healthcare-related topics. People find such platforms suitable for self-disclosure, seeking medical opinions, finding simplified explanations for their medical conditions, and answering others' questions. However, answers on these forums are typically diverse and prone to off-topic discussions. It can be challenging for readers to sift through numerous answers and extract meaningful insights, making answer summarization a crucial task for CQA forums. While several efforts have been made to summarize the community answers, most of them are limited to the open domain and overlook the different perspectives offered by these answers. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel task of perspective-specific answer summarization. We identify various perspectives, within healthcare-related responses and frame a perspective-driven abstractive summary covering all responses. To achieve this, we annotate 3167 CQA threads with 6193 perspective-aware summaries in our PUMA dataset. Further, we propose PLASMA, a prompt-driven controllable summarization model. To encapsulate the perspective-specific conditions, we design an energy-controlled loss function for the optimization. We also leverage the prefix tuner to learn the intricacies of the health-care perspective summarization. Our evaluation against five baselines suggests the superior performance of PLASMA by a margin of 1.5-21% improvement. We supplement our experiments with ablation and qualitative analysis.

Sriram Pingali, Shweta Yadav, Pratik Dutta et al.

The recent advancement of pre-trained Transformer models has propelled the development of effective text mining models across various biomedical tasks. However, these models are primarily learned on the textual data and often lack the domain knowledge of the entities to capture the context beyond the sentence. In this study, we introduced a novel framework that enables the model to learn multi-omnics biological information about entities (proteins) with the help of additional multi-modal cues like molecular structure. Towards this, rather developing modality-specific architectures, we devise a generalized and optimized graph based multi-modal learning mechanism that utilizes the GraphBERT model to encode the textual and molecular structure information and exploit the underlying features of various modalities to enable end-to-end learning. We evaluated our proposed method on ProteinProtein Interaction task from the biomedical corpus, where our proposed generalized approach is observed to be benefited by the additional domain-specific modality.

Shweta Yadav, Deepak Gupta, Asma Ben Abacha et al.

The growth of online consumer health questions has led to the necessity for reliable and accurate question answering systems. A recent study showed that manual summarization of consumer health questions brings significant improvement in retrieving relevant answers. However, the automatic summarization of long questions is a challenging task due to the lack of training data and the complexity of the related subtasks, such as the question focus and type recognition. In this paper, we introduce a reinforcement learning-based framework for abstractive question summarization. We propose two novel rewards obtained from the downstream tasks of (i) question-type identification and (ii) question-focus recognition to regularize the question generation model. These rewards ensure the generation of semantically valid questions and encourage the inclusion of key medical entities/foci in the question summary. We evaluated our proposed method on two benchmark datasets and achieved higher performance over state-of-the-art models. The manual evaluation of the summaries reveals that the generated questions are more diverse and have fewer factual inconsistencies than the baseline summaries

Shweta Yadav, Deepak Gupta, Asma Ben Abacha et al.

Searching for health information online is becoming customary for more and more consumers every day, which makes the need for efficient and reliable question answering systems more pressing. An important contributor to the success rates of these systems is their ability to fully understand the consumers' questions. However, these questions are frequently longer than needed and mention peripheral information that is not useful in finding relevant answers. Question summarization is one of the potential solutions to simplifying long and complex consumer questions before attempting to find an answer. In this paper, we study the task of abstractive summarization for real-world consumer health questions. We develop an abstractive question summarization model that leverages the semantic interpretation of a question via recognition of medical entities, which enables the generation of informative summaries. Towards this, we propose multiple Cloze tasks (i.e. the task of filing missing words in a given context) to identify the key medical entities that enforce the model to have better coverage in question-focus recognition. Additionally, we infuse the decoder inputs with question-type information to generate question-type driven summaries. When evaluated on the MeQSum benchmark corpus, our framework outperformed the state-of-the-art method by 10.2 ROUGE-L points. We also conducted a manual evaluation to assess the correctness of the generated summaries.

Shweta Yadav, Jainish Chauhan, Joy Prakash Sain et al.

Existing studies on using social media for deriving mental health status of users focus on the depression detection task. However, for case management and referral to psychiatrists, healthcare workers require practical and scalable depressive disorder screening and triage system. This study aims to design and evaluate a decision support system (DSS) to reliably determine the depressive triage level by capturing fine-grained depressive symptoms expressed in user tweets through the emulation of Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) that is routinely used in clinical practice. The reliable detection of depressive symptoms from tweets is challenging because the 280-character limit on tweets incentivizes the use of creative artifacts in the utterances and figurative usage contributes to effective expression. We propose a novel BERT based robust multi-task learning framework to accurately identify the depressive symptoms using the auxiliary task of figurative usage detection. Specifically, our proposed novel task sharing mechanism, co-task aware attention, enables automatic selection of optimal information across the BERT layers and tasks by soft-sharing of parameters. Our results show that modeling figurative usage can demonstrably improve the model's robustness and reliability for distinguishing the depression symptoms.

Shweta Yadav, Usha Lokala, Raminta Daniulaityte et al.

With the increasing legalization of medical and recreational use of cannabis, more research is needed to understand the association between depression and consumer behavior related to cannabis consumption. Big social media data has potential to provide deeper insights about these associations to public health analysts. In this interdisciplinary study, we demonstrate the value of incorporating domain-specific knowledge in the learning process to identify the relationships between cannabis use and depression. We develop an end-to-end knowledge infused deep learning framework (Gated-K-BERT) that leverages the pre-trained BERT language representation model and domain-specific declarative knowledge source (Drug Abuse Ontology (DAO)) to jointly extract entities and their relationship using gated fusion sharing mechanism. Our model is further tailored to provide more focus to the entities mention in the sentence through entity-position aware attention layer, where ontology is used to locate the target entities position. Experimental results show that inclusion of the knowledge-aware attentive representation in association with BERT can extract the cannabis-depression relationship with better coverage in comparison to the state-of-the-art relation extractor.

Shweta Yadav, Joy Prakash Sain, Amit Sheth et al.

The unprecedented growth of Internet users has resulted in an abundance of unstructured information on social media including health forums, where patients request health-related information or opinions from other users. Previous studies have shown that online peer support has limited effectiveness without expert intervention. Therefore, a system capable of assessing the severity of health state from the patients' social media posts can help health professionals (HP) in prioritizing the user's post. In this study, we inspect the efficacy of different aspects of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to identify the severity of the user's health state in relation to two perspectives(tasks) (a) Medical Condition (i.e., Recover, Exist, Deteriorate, Other) and (b) Medication (i.e., Effective, Ineffective, Serious Adverse Effect, Other) in online health communities. We propose a multiview learning framework that models both the textual content as well as contextual-information to assess the severity of the user's health state. Specifically, our model utilizes the NLU views such as sentiment, emotions, personality, and use of figurative language to extract the contextual information. The diverse NLU views demonstrate its effectiveness on both the tasks and as well as on the individual disease to assess a user's health.

Shweta Yadav, Srivatsa Ramesh, Sriparna Saha et al.

To minimize the accelerating amount of time invested in the biomedical literature search, numerous approaches for automated knowledge extraction have been proposed. Relation extraction is one such task where semantic relations between the entities are identified from the free text. In the biomedical domain, extraction of regulatory pathways, metabolic processes, adverse drug reaction or disease models necessitates knowledge from the individual relations, for example, physical or regulatory interactions between genes, proteins, drugs, chemical, disease or phenotype. In this paper, we study the relation extraction task from three major biomedical and clinical tasks, namely drug-drug interaction, protein-protein interaction, and medical concept relation extraction. Towards this, we model the relation extraction problem in multi-task learning (MTL) framework and introduce for the first time the concept of structured self-attentive network complemented with the adversarial learning approach for the prediction of relationships from the biomedical and clinical text. The fundamental notion of MTL is to simultaneously learn multiple problems together by utilizing the concepts of the shared representation. Additionally, we also generate the highly efficient single task model which exploits the shortest dependency path embedding learned over the attentive gated recurrent unit to compare our proposed MTL models. The framework we propose significantly improves overall the baselines (deep learning techniques) and single-task models for predicting the relationships, without compromising on the performance of all the tasks.

Dhanachandra Ningthoujam, Shweta Yadav, Pushpak Bhattacharyya et al.

Owing to the exponential rise in the electronic medical records, information extraction in this domain is becoming an important area of research in recent years. Relation extraction between the medical concepts such as medical problem, treatment, and test etc. is also one of the most important tasks in this area. In this paper, we present an efficient relation extraction system based on the shortest dependency path (SDP) generated from the dependency parsed tree of the sentence. Instead of relying on many handcrafted features and the whole sequence of tokens present in a sentence, our system relies only on the SDP between the target entities. For every pair of entities, the system takes only the words in the SDP, their dependency labels, Part-of-Speech information and the types of the entities as the input. We develop a dependency parser for extracting dependency information. We perform our experiments on the benchmark i2b2 dataset for clinical relation extraction challenge 2010. Experimental results show that our system outperforms the existing systems.

Shweta Yadav, Joy Sain, Amit Sheth et al.

The unprecedented growth of Internet users in recent years has resulted in an abundance of unstructured information in the form of social media text. A large percentage of this population is actively engaged in health social networks to share health-related information. In this paper, we address an important and timely topic by analyzing the users' sentiments and emotions w.r.t their medical conditions. Towards this, we examine users on popular medical forums (Patient.info,dailystrength.org), where they post on important topics such as asthma, allergy, depression, and anxiety. First, we provide a benchmark setup for the task by crawling the data, and further define the sentiment specific fine-grained medical conditions (Recovered, Exist, Deteriorate, and Other). We propose an effective architecture that uses a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) as a data-driven feature extractor and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) as a classifier. We further develop a sentiment feature which is sensitive to the medical context. Here, we show that the use of medical sentiment feature along with extracted features from CNN improves the model performance. In addition to our dataset, we also evaluate our approach on the benchmark "CLEF eHealth 2014" corpora and show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques.

Shweta Yadav, Ankit Kumar, Asif Ekbal et al.

Knowledge about protein-protein interactions is essential in understanding the biological processes such as metabolic pathways, DNA replication, and transcription etc. However, a majority of the existing Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) systems are dependent primarily on the scientific literature, which is yet not accessible as a structured database. Thus, efficient information extraction systems are required for identifying PPI information from the large collection of biomedical texts. Most of the existing systems model the PPI extraction task as a classification problem and are tailored to the handcrafted feature set including domain dependent features. In this paper, we present a novel method based on deep bidirectional long short-term memory (B-LSTM) technique that exploits word sequences and dependency path related information to identify PPI information from text. This model leverages joint modeling of proteins and relations in a single unified framework, which we name as Shortest Dependency Path B-LSTM (sdpLSTM) model. We perform experiments on two popular benchmark PPI datasets, namely AiMed & BioInfer. The evaluation shows the F1-score values of 86.45% and 77.35% on AiMed and BioInfer, respectively. Comparisons with the existing systems show that our proposed approach attains state-of-the-art performance.