@inproceedings{das-etal-2025-secret,
title = "$SECRET$: Semi-supervised Clinical Trial Document Similarity Search",
author = "Das, Trisha and
Shafquat, Afrah and
Beigi, Mandis and
Aptekar, Jacob and
Sun, Jimeng",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.264/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.264",
pages = "5278--5291",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
abstract = "Clinical trials are vital for evaluation of safety and efficacy of new treatments. However, clinical trials are resource-intensive, time-consuming and expensive to conduct, where errors in trial design, reduced efficacy, and safety events can result in significant delays, financial losses, and damage to reputation. These risks underline the importance of informed and strategic decisions in trial design to mitigate these risks and improve the chances of a successful trial. Identifying similar historical trials is critical as these trials can provide an important reference for potential pitfalls and challenges including serious adverse events, dosage inaccuracies, recruitment difficulties, patient adherence issues, etc. Addressing these challenges in trial design can lead to development of more effective study protocols with optimized patient safety and trial efficiency. In this paper, we present a novel method to identify similar historical trials by summarizing clinical trial protocols and searching for similar trials based on a query trial{'}s protocol. Our approach significantly outperforms all baselines, achieving up to a 78{\%} improvement in recall@1 and a 53{\%} improvement in precision@1 over the best baseline. We also show that our method outperforms all other baselines in partial trial similarity search and zero-shot patient-trial matching, highlighting its superior utility in these tasks."
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<abstract>Clinical trials are vital for evaluation of safety and efficacy of new treatments. However, clinical trials are resource-intensive, time-consuming and expensive to conduct, where errors in trial design, reduced efficacy, and safety events can result in significant delays, financial losses, and damage to reputation. These risks underline the importance of informed and strategic decisions in trial design to mitigate these risks and improve the chances of a successful trial. Identifying similar historical trials is critical as these trials can provide an important reference for potential pitfalls and challenges including serious adverse events, dosage inaccuracies, recruitment difficulties, patient adherence issues, etc. Addressing these challenges in trial design can lead to development of more effective study protocols with optimized patient safety and trial efficiency. In this paper, we present a novel method to identify similar historical trials by summarizing clinical trial protocols and searching for similar trials based on a query trial’s protocol. Our approach significantly outperforms all baselines, achieving up to a 78% improvement in recall@1 and a 53% improvement in precision@1 over the best baseline. We also show that our method outperforms all other baselines in partial trial similarity search and zero-shot patient-trial matching, highlighting its superior utility in these tasks.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T SECRET: Semi-supervised Clinical Trial Document Similarity Search
%A Das, Trisha
%A Shafquat, Afrah
%A Beigi, Mandis
%A Aptekar, Jacob
%A Sun, Jimeng
%Y Che, Wanxiang
%Y Nabende, Joyce
%Y Shutova, Ekaterina
%Y Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
%S Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-251-0
%F das-etal-2025-secret
%X Clinical trials are vital for evaluation of safety and efficacy of new treatments. However, clinical trials are resource-intensive, time-consuming and expensive to conduct, where errors in trial design, reduced efficacy, and safety events can result in significant delays, financial losses, and damage to reputation. These risks underline the importance of informed and strategic decisions in trial design to mitigate these risks and improve the chances of a successful trial. Identifying similar historical trials is critical as these trials can provide an important reference for potential pitfalls and challenges including serious adverse events, dosage inaccuracies, recruitment difficulties, patient adherence issues, etc. Addressing these challenges in trial design can lead to development of more effective study protocols with optimized patient safety and trial efficiency. In this paper, we present a novel method to identify similar historical trials by summarizing clinical trial protocols and searching for similar trials based on a query trial’s protocol. Our approach significantly outperforms all baselines, achieving up to a 78% improvement in recall@1 and a 53% improvement in precision@1 over the best baseline. We also show that our method outperforms all other baselines in partial trial similarity search and zero-shot patient-trial matching, highlighting its superior utility in these tasks.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.264
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.264/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.264
%P 5278-5291
Markdown (Informal)
[SECRET: Semi-supervised Clinical Trial Document Similarity Search](https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.264/) (Das et al., ACL 2025)
ACL
- Trisha Das, Afrah Shafquat, Mandis Beigi, Jacob Aptekar, and Jimeng Sun. 2025. SECRET: Semi-supervised Clinical Trial Document Similarity Search. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5278–5291, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.