Sebis at SemEval-2023 Task 7: A Joint System for Natural Language Inference and Evidence Retrieval from Clinical Trial Reports
This work addresses the challenge of processing increasing volumes of clinical trial data for evidence-based healthcare, though it is incremental as it builds on existing NLP methods for a specific domain.
The authors tackled the problem of automating evidence retrieval and natural language inference from clinical trial reports to assist medical experts, achieving a 3rd-place ranking out of 40 participants in the SemEval-2023 Task 7 competition.
With the increasing number of clinical trial reports generated every day, it is becoming hard to keep up with novel discoveries that inform evidence-based healthcare recommendations. To help automate this process and assist medical experts, NLP solutions are being developed. This motivated the SemEval-2023 Task 7, where the goal was to develop an NLP system for two tasks: evidence retrieval and natural language inference from clinical trial data. In this paper, we describe our two developed systems. The first one is a pipeline system that models the two tasks separately, while the second one is a joint system that learns the two tasks simultaneously with a shared representation and a multi-task learning approach. The final system combines their outputs in an ensemble system. We formalize the models, present their characteristics and challenges, and provide an analysis of achieved results. Our system ranked 3rd out of 40 participants with a final submission.