Zero-Shot Entailment Learning for Ontology-Based Biomedical Annotation Without Explicit Mentions

Rumana Ferdous Munne, Noriki Nishida, Shanshan Liu, Narumi Tokunaga, Yuki Yamagata, Kouji Kozaki, Yuji Matsumoto


Abstract
Automatic biomedical annotation is essential for advancing medical research, diagnosis, and treatment. However, it presents significant challenges, especially when entities are not explicitly mentioned in the text, leading to difficulties in extraction of relevant information. These challenges are intensified by unclear terminology, implicit background knowledge, and the lack of labeled training data. Annotating with a specific ontology adds another layer of complexity, as it requires aligning text with a predefined set of concepts and relationships. Manual annotation is time-consuming and expensive, highlighting the need for automated systems to handle large volumes of biomedical data efficiently. In this paper, we propose an entailment-based zero-shot text classification approach to annotate biomedical text passages using the Homeostasis Imbalance Process (HOIP) ontology. Our method reformulates the annotation task as a multi-class, multi-label classification problem and uses natural language inference to classify text into related HOIP processes. Experimental results show promising performance, especially when processes are not explicitly mentioned, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach for ontological annotation of biomedical literature.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.542
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8148–8159
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.542/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rumana Ferdous Munne, Noriki Nishida, Shanshan Liu, Narumi Tokunaga, Yuki Yamagata, Kouji Kozaki, and Yuji Matsumoto. 2025. Zero-Shot Entailment Learning for Ontology-Based Biomedical Annotation Without Explicit Mentions. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 8148–8159, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Zero-Shot Entailment Learning for Ontology-Based Biomedical Annotation Without Explicit Mentions (Munne et al., COLING 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.542.pdf