Leveraging Task Transferability to Meta-learning for Clinical Section Classification with Limited Data

Zhuohao Chen, Jangwon Kim, Ram Bhakta, Mustafa Sir


Abstract
Identifying sections is one of the critical components of understanding medical information from unstructured clinical notes and developing assistive technologies for clinical note-writing tasks. Most state-of-the-art text classification systems require thousands of in-domain text data to achieve high performance. However, collecting in-domain and recent clinical note data with section labels is challenging given the high level of privacy and sensitivity. The present paper proposes an algorithmic way to improve the task transferability of meta-learning-based text classification in order to address the issue of low-resource target data. Specifically, we explore how to make the best use of the source dataset and propose a unique task transferability measure named Normalized Negative Conditional Entropy (NNCE). Leveraging the NNCE, we develop strategies for selecting clinical categories and sections from source task data to boost cross-domain meta-learning accuracy. Experimental results show that our task selection strategies improve section classification accuracy significantly compared to meta-learning algorithms.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.461
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6690–6702
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.461
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.461
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhuohao Chen, Jangwon Kim, Ram Bhakta, and Mustafa Sir. 2022. Leveraging Task Transferability to Meta-learning for Clinical Section Classification with Limited Data. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6690–6702, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging Task Transferability to Meta-learning for Clinical Section Classification with Limited Data (Chen et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.461.pdf