NLI4CT: Multi-Evidence Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trial Reports

Mael Jullien, Marco Valentino, Hannah Frost, Paul O’Regan, Dónal Landers, Andre Freitas


Abstract
How can we interpret and retrieve medical evidence to support clinical decisions? Clinical trial reports (CTR) amassed over the years contain indispensable information for the development of personalized medicine. However, it is practically infeasible to manually inspect over 400,000+ clinical trial reports in order to find the best evidence for experimental treatments. Natural Language Inference (NLI) offers a potential solution to this problem, by allowing the scalable computation of textual entailment. However, existing NLI models perform poorly on biomedical corpora, and previously published datasets fail to capture the full complexity of inference over CTRs. In this work, we present a novel resource to advance research on NLI for reasoning on CTRs. The resource includes two main tasks. Firstly, to determine the inference relation between a natural language statement, and a CTR. Secondly, to retrieve supporting facts to justify the predicted relation. We provide NLI4CT, a corpus of 2400 statements and CTRs, annotated for these tasks. Baselines on this corpus expose the limitations of existing NLI approaches, with 6 state-of-the-art NLI models achieving a maximum F1 score of 0.627. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to design a task that covers the interpretation of full CTRs. To encourage further work on this challenging dataset, we make the corpus, competition leaderboard, and website, available on CodaLab, and code to replicate the baseline experiments on GitHub.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.1041
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16745–16764
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.1041
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.1041
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mael Jullien, Marco Valentino, Hannah Frost, Paul O’Regan, Dónal Landers, and Andre Freitas. 2023. NLI4CT: Multi-Evidence Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trial Reports. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 16745–16764, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NLI4CT: Multi-Evidence Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trial Reports (Jullien et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.1041.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.1041.mp4