Dense Feature Memory Augmented Transformers for COVID-19 Vaccination Search Classification
This work addresses the need for accurate search insights on COVID-19 vaccinations, which is important for public health monitoring, but it is incremental as it builds on existing NLU techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of classifying COVID-19 vaccination-related search queries by proposing a model that combines pretrained Transformers with dense features treated as memory tokens, resulting in a relative improvement of +15% in F1 score and +14% in precision over a baseline.
With the devastating outbreak of COVID-19, vaccines are one of the crucial lines of defense against mass infection in this global pandemic. Given the protection they provide, vaccines are becoming mandatory in certain social and professional settings. This paper presents a classification model for detecting COVID-19 vaccination related search queries, a machine learning model that is used to generate search insights for COVID-19 vaccinations. The proposed method combines and leverages advancements from modern state-of-the-art (SOTA) natural language understanding (NLU) techniques such as pretrained Transformers with traditional dense features. We propose a novel approach of considering dense features as memory tokens that the model can attend to. We show that this new modeling approach enables a significant improvement to the Vaccine Search Insights (VSI) task, improving a strong well-established gradient-boosting baseline by relative +15% improvement in F1 score and +14% in precision.