Leveraging ChatGPT in Pharmacovigilance Event Extraction: An Empirical Study

Zhaoyue Sun, Gabriele Pergola, Byron Wallace, Yulan He


Abstract
With the advent of large language models (LLMs), there has been growing interest in exploring their potential for medical applications. This research aims to investigate the ability of LLMs, specifically ChatGPT, in the context of pharmacovigilance event extraction, of which the main goal is to identify and extract adverse events or potential therapeutic events from textual medical sources. We conduct extensive experiments to assess the performance of ChatGPT in the pharmacovigilance event extraction task, employing various prompts and demonstration selection strategies. The findings demonstrate that while ChatGPT demonstrates reasonable performance with appropriate demonstration selection strategies, it still falls short compared to fully fine-tuned small models. Additionally, we explore the potential of leveraging ChatGPT for data augmentation. However, our investigation reveals that the inclusion of synthesized data into fine-tuning may lead to a decrease in performance, possibly attributed to noise in the ChatGPT-generated labels. To mitigate this, we explore different filtering strategies and find that, with the proper approach, more stable performance can be achieved, although constant improvement remains elusive.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-short.30
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
344–357
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-short.30
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhaoyue Sun, Gabriele Pergola, Byron Wallace, and Yulan He. 2024. Leveraging ChatGPT in Pharmacovigilance Event Extraction: An Empirical Study. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 344–357, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging ChatGPT in Pharmacovigilance Event Extraction: An Empirical Study (Sun et al., EACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-short.30.pdf