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Clinical trials are critical for drug development. Constructing the appropriate eligibility criteria (i.e., the inclusion/exclusion criteria for patient recruitment) is essential for the trial&#39;s success. Proper design of clinical trial protocols should consider similar precedent trials and their eligibility criteria to ensure sufficient patient coverage. In this paper, we present a method named AutoTrial to aid the design of clinical eligibility criteria using language models. It allows (1) controllable generation under instructions via a hybrid of discrete and neural prompting, (2) scalable knowledge incorporation via in-context learning, and (3) explicit reasoning chains to provide rationales for understanding the outputs. Experiments on over 70K clinical trials verify that AutoTrial generates high-quality criteria texts that are fluent and coherent and with high accuracy in capturing the relevant clinical concepts to the target trial. It is noteworthy that our method, with a much smaller parameter size, gains around 60% winning rate against the GPT-3.5 baselines via human evaluations.

EMNLP 2023

AutoTrial: Prompting Language Models for Clinical Trial Design

drug development

clinical trial

large language model

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AMA Research Challenge 2022

Welcome to the largest national, multi-specialty research event featuring research from 750 medical students, residents and fellows, and international medical graduates.


Clinical trials are critical for drug development. Constructing the appropriate eligibility criteria (i.e., the inclusion/exclusion criteria for patient recruitment) is essential for the trial's success. Proper design of clinical trial protocols should consider similar precedent trials and their eligibility criteria to ensure sufficient patient coverage. In this paper, we present a method named AutoTrial to aid the design of clinical eligibility criteria using language models. It allows (1) controllable generation under instructions via a hybrid of discrete and neural prompting, (2) scalable knowledge incorporation via in-context learning, and (3) explicit reasoning chains to provide rationales for understanding the outputs. Experiments on over 70K clinical trials verify that AutoTrial generates high-quality criteria texts that are fluent and coherent and with high accuracy in capturing the relevant clinical concepts to the target trial. It is noteworthy that our method, with a much smaller parameter size, gains around 60% winning rate against the GPT-3.5 baselines via human evaluations.

poster

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

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Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

Language models (LMs) are capable of conducting in-context learning for multiple choice reasoning tasks, but the options in these tasks are treated equally. As humans often first eliminate wrong options before picking the final correct answer, we argue a similar two-step strategy can make LMs better at these tasks. To this end, we present the Process of Elimination (POE), a two-step scoring method. In the first step, POE scores each option, and eliminates seemingly wrong options. In the second step, POE masks these wrong options, and makes the final prediction from the remaining options. Zero-shot experiments on 8 reasoning tasks illustrate the effectiveness of POE, and a following analysis finds our method to be especially performant on logical reasoning tasks. We further analyze the effect of masks, and show that POE applies to few-shot settings and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

POE: Process of Elimination for Multiple Choice Reasoning | VIDEO

Distantly supervised named entity recognition (DS-NER) aims to locate entity mentions and classify their types with only knowledge bases or gazetteers and unlabeled corpus. However, distant annotations are noisy and degrade the performance of NER models. In this paper, we propose a noise-robust prototype network named MProto for the DS-NER task. Different from previous prototype-based NER methods, MProto represents each entity type with multiple prototypes to characterize the intra-class variance among entity representations. To optimize the classifier, each token should be assigned an appropriate ground-truth prototype and we consider such token-prototype assignment as an optimal transport (OT) problem. Furthermore, to mitigate the noise from incomplete labeling, we propose a novel denoised optimal transport (DOT) algorithm. 
Specifically, we utilize the assignment result between *Other* class tokens and all prototypes to distinguish unlabeled entity tokens from true negatives.
Experiments on several DS-NER benchmarks demonstrate that our MProto achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code is now available on Github.

MProto: Multi-Prototype Network with Denoised Optimal Transport for Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition

Referring image segmentation is a task that aims to predict pixel-wise masks corresponding to objects in an image described by natural language expressions. Previous methods for referring image segmentation employ a cascade framework to break down complex problems into multiple stages. However, its defects also obvious: existing methods within the cascade framework may encounter challenges in both maintaining a strong focus on the most relevant information during specific stages of the referring image segmentation process and rectifying errors propagated from early stages, which can ultimately result in sub-optimal performance. To address these limitations, we propose the Joint Mask Contextual Embedding Learning Network (JMCELN). JMCELN is designed to enhance the Cascade Framework by incorporating a Learnable Contextual Embedding and a Progressive Alignment Network (PAN). The Learnable Contextual Embedding module dynamically stores and utilizes reasoning information based on the current mask prediction results, enabling the network to adaptively capture and refine pertinent information for improved mask prediction accuracy. Furthermore, the Progressive Alignment Network (PAN) is introduced as an integral part of JMCELN. PAN leverages the output from the previous layer as a filter for the current output, effectively reducing inconsistencies between predictions from different stages. By iteratively aligning the predictions, PAN guides the Learnable Contextual Embedding to incorporate more discriminative information for reasoning, leading to enhanced prediction quality and a reduction in error propagation. With these methods, we achieved state-of-the-art results on three commonly used benchmarks, especially in more intricate datasets. The code will be released.

Referring Image Segmentation via Joint Mask Contextual Embedding Learning and Progressive Alignment Network | VIDEO

Dialogue State Tracking (DST), a key component of task-oriented conversation systems, represents user intentions by determining the values of pre-defined slots in an ongoing dialogue. 
Existing approaches use hand-crafted templates and additional slot information to fine-tune and prompt large pre-trained language models and elicit slot values from the dialogue context. Significant manual effort and domain knowledge is required to design effective prompts, limiting the generalizability of these approaches to new domains and tasks. 
In this work, we propose DiSTRICT, a generalizable in-context tuning approach for DST that retrieves highly relevant training examples for a given dialogue to fine-tune the model without any hand-crafted templates. 
Experiments with the MultiWOZ benchmark datasets show that DiSTRICT outperforms existing approaches in various zero-shot and few-shot settings using a much smaller model, thereby providing an important advantage for real-world deployments that often have limited resource availability.

DiSTRICT: Dialogue State Tracking with Retriever Driven In-Context Tuning

Recently, the topic of table pre-training has attracted considerable research interest. However, how to employ table pre-training to boost the performance of tabular prediction remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose TapTap, the first attempt that leverages table pre-training to empower models for tabular prediction. After pre-training on a large corpus of real-world tabular data, TapTap can generate high-quality synthetic tables to support various applications on tabular data, including privacy protection, low resource regime, missing value imputation, and imbalanced classification. Extensive experiments on $12$ datasets demonstrate that TapTap outperforms a total of $16$ baselines in different scenarios. Meanwhile, it can be easily combined with various backbone models, including LightGBM, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Transformer. Moreover, with the aid of table pre-training, models trained using synthetic data generated by TapTap can even compete with models using the original dataset on half of the experimental datasets, marking a milestone in the development of synthetic tabular data generation. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/ZhangTP1996/TapTap.

Generative Table Pre-training Empowers Models for Tabular Prediction

Engaging with discussion of TV shows online often requires individuals to refrain from consuming show-related content for extended periods to avoid spoilers. While existing research on spoiler detection shows promising results in safeguarding viewers from general spoilers, it fails to address the issue of users abstaining from show-related content during their watch. This is primarily because the definition of a spoiler varies depending on the viewer's progress in the show, and conventional spoiler detection methods lack the granularity to capture this complexity. To tackle this challenge, we propose the task of spoiler matching, which involves assigning an episode number to a spoiler given a specific TV show. We frame this task as semantic text matching and introduce a dataset comprised of comments and episode summaries to evaluate model performance. Given the length of each example, our dataset can also serve as a benchmark for long-range language models.

Spoiler Detection as Semantic Text Matching | VIDEO

Trained on web-scale image-text pairs, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP can recognize images of common objects in a zero-shot fashion. However, it is underexplored how to use CLIP for zero-shot recognition of highly specialized concepts, e.g., species of birds, plants, and animals, for which their scientific names are written in Latin or Greek. Indeed, CLIP performs poorly for zero-shot species recognition with prompts that use scientific names, e.g., ``a photo of Lepus Timidus'' (which is a scientific name in Latin). This is because these names are usually not included in CLIP's training set. To improve performance, we explore using large-language models (LLMs) to generate descriptions (e.g., of species color and shape) and additionally use them in prompts. However, this method improves only marginally. Instead, we are motivated to translate scientific names (e.g., Lepus Timidus) to common English names (e.g., {\tt mountain hare}) and use such in the prompts. We find that common names are more likely to be included in CLIP's training set, and prompting them achieves 2$\sim$5 times higher accuracy on benchmarking datasets of fine-grained species recognition.

Prompting Scientific Names for Zero-Shot Species Recognition | VIDEO

Intelligent navigation-helper agents are critical as they can navigate users in unknown areas through environmental awareness and conversational ability, serving as potential accessibility tools for individuals with disabilities. In this work, we first introduce a novel benchmark, Respond to Help Requests (R2H), to promote the development of multi-modal navigation helpers capable of responding to requests for help, utilizing existing dialog-based embodied datasets. R2H mainly includes two tasks: (1) Respond to Dialog History (RDH), which assesses the helper agent's ability to generate informative responses based on a given dialog history, and (2) Respond during Interaction (RdI), which evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of the response during consistent cooperation with a task performer. Furthermore, we explore two approaches to construct the navigation-helper agent, including fine-tuning a novel task-oriented multi-modal response generation model that can see and respond, named SeeRee, and employing a multi-modal large language model in a zero-shot manner. Analysis of the task and method was conducted based on both automatic benchmarking and human evaluations.

R2H: Building Multimodal Navigation Helpers that Respond to Help Requests

One of the exciting capabilities of recent language models for dialog is their ability to independently search for relevant information to ground a given dialog response. However, obtaining training data to teach models how to issue search queries is time and resource consuming.
In this work, we propose $q2d$: an automatic data generation pipeline that generates information-seeking dialogs from questions. We prompt a large language model (PaLM) to create conversational versions of question answering datasets, and use it to improve query generation models that communicate with external search APIs to ground dialog responses. Unlike previous approaches which relied on human written dialogs with search queries, our method allows to automatically generate query-based grounded dialogs with better control and scale.
Our experiments demonstrate that: (1) For query generation on the QReCC dataset, models trained on our synthetically-generated data achieve 90%-97% of the performance of models trained on the human-generated data; (2) We can successfully generate data for training dialog models in new domains without any existing dialog data as demonstrated on the multi-hop MuSiQue and Bamboogle QA datasets. (3) We perform a thorough analysis of the generated dialogs showing that humans find them of high quality and struggle to distinguish them from human-written dialogs.

q2d: Turning Questions into Dialogs to Teach Models How to Search

Pretrained language models have improved zero-shot text classification by allowing the transfer of semantic knowledge from the training data in order to classify among specific label sets in downstream tasks. We propose a simple way to further improve zero-shot accuracies with minimal effort. We curate small finetuning datasets intended to describe the labels for a task. Unlike typical finetuning data, which has texts annotated with labels, our data simply describes the labels in language, e.g., using a few related terms, dictionary/encyclopedia entries, and short templates. Across a range of topic and sentiment datasets, our method is more accurate than zero-shot by 17-19% absolute. It is also more robust to choices required for zero-shot classification, such as patterns for prompting the model to classify and mappings from labels to tokens in the model's vocabulary. Furthermore, since our data merely describes the labels but does not use input texts, finetuning on it yields a model that performs strongly on multiple text domains for a given label set, even improving over few-shot out-of-domain classification in multiple settings.

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Unnecessary Variation in Clinical Trial Eligibility Criteria: a Call for Standardization

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