HealthPrompt: A Zero-shot Learning Paradigm for Clinical Natural Language Processing

Sonish Sivarajkumar; Yanshan Wang

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arXiv · 2203.05061

HealthPrompt: A Zero-shot Learning Paradigm for Clinical Natural Language Processing

Sonish Sivarajkumar·Yanshan Wang

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Abstract

Deep learning algorithms are dependent on the availability of large-scale annotated clinical text datasets. The lack of such publicly available datasets is the biggest bottleneck for the development of clinical Natural Language Processing(NLP) systems. Zero-Shot Learning(ZSL) refers to the use of deep learning models to classify instances from new classes of which no training data have been seen before. Prompt-based learning is an emerging ZSL technique where we define task-based templates for NLP tasks. We developed a novel prompt-based clinical NLP framework called HealthPrompt and applied the paradigm of prompt-based learning on clinical texts. In this technique, rather than fine-tuning a Pre-trained Language Model(PLM), the task definitions are tuned by defining a prompt template. We performed an in-depth analysis of HealthPrompt on six different PLMs in a no-data setting. Our experiments prove that prompts effectively capture the context of clinical texts and perform remarkably well without any training data.

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Sonish Sivarajkumar, Yanshan Wang. 2022-03-09. HealthPrompt: A Zero-shot Learning Paradigm for Clinical Natural Language Processing. https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.05061

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