Learning Domain-Specialised Representations for Cross-Lingual Biomedical Entity Linking

Fangyu Liu, Ivan Vulić, Anna Korhonen, Nigel Collier


Abstract
Injecting external domain-specific knowledge (e.g., UMLS) into pretrained language models (LMs) advances their capability to handle specialised in-domain tasks such as biomedical entity linking (BEL). However, such abundant expert knowledge is available only for a handful of languages (e.g., English). In this work, by proposing a novel cross-lingual biomedical entity linking task (XL-BEL) and establishing a new XL-BEL benchmark spanning 10 typologically diverse languages, we first investigate the ability of standard knowledge-agnostic as well as knowledge-enhanced monolingual and multilingual LMs beyond the standard monolingual English BEL task. The scores indicate large gaps to English performance. We then address the challenge of transferring domain-specific knowledge in resource-rich languages to resource-poor ones. To this end, we propose and evaluate a series of cross-lingual transfer methods for the XL-BEL task, and demonstrate that general-domain bitext helps propagate the available English knowledge to languages with little to no in-domain data. Remarkably, we show that our proposed domain-specific transfer methods yield consistent gains across all target languages, sometimes up to 20 Precision@1 points, without any in-domain knowledge in the target language, and without any in-domain parallel data.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-short.72
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
565–574
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.72
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-short.72
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fangyu Liu, Ivan Vulić, Anna Korhonen, and Nigel Collier. 2021. Learning Domain-Specialised Representations for Cross-Lingual Biomedical Entity Linking. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 565–574, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning Domain-Specialised Representations for Cross-Lingual Biomedical Entity Linking (Liu et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.72.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.72.mp4
Code
 cambridgeltl/sapbert
Data
XL-BEL