The success of pretrained language models (PLMs) across a spate of use-cases has led to significant investment from the NLP community towards building domain-specific foundational models. On the other hand, in mission critical settings such as biomedical applications, other aspects also factor in—chief of which is a model’s ability to produce reasonable estimates of its own uncertainty. In the present study, we discuss these two desiderata through the lens of how they shape the entropy of a model’s output probability distribution. We find that domain specificity and uncertainty awareness can often be successfully combined, but the exact task at hand weighs in much more strongly.

Multi-Task Learning used with pre-trained models has been quite popular in the field of Natural Language Processing in recent years. This framework remains still challenging due to the complexity of the tasks and the challenges associated with fine-tuning large pre-trained models. In this paper, we propose a new approach for Multi-task learning which is based on stacking the weights of Neural Networks as a tensor. We show that low-rank updates in the canonical polyadic tensor decomposition of this tensor of weights lead to a simple, yet efficient algorithm, which without loss of performance allows to reduce considerably the model parameters. We investigate the interactions between tasks inside the model as well as the inclusion of sparsity to find the best tensor rank and to increase the compression rate. Our strategy is consistent with recent efforts that attempt to use constraints to fine-tune some model components. More precisely, we achieve equivalent performance as the state-of-the-art on the General Language Understanding Evaluation benchmark by training only 0.3 of the parameters per task while not modifying the baseline weights.

The number of scientific articles is increasing tremendously across all domains to such an extent that it has become hard for researchers to remain up-to-date. Evidently, scientific language understanding systems and Information Extraction (IE) systems, with the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, are benefiting the needs of users. Although the majority of the practices for building such systems are data-driven, advocating the idea of “The more, the better”. In this work, we revisit the paradigm - questioning what type of data : text (title, abstract) or citations, can have more impact on the performance of scientific language understanding systems.

Biomedical NER is an active research area today. Despite the availability of state-of-the-art models for standard NER tasks, their performance degrades on biomedical data due to OOV entities and the challenges encountered in specialized domains. We use Flair-NER framework to investigate the effectiveness of various contextual and static embeddings for NER on Spanish tweets, in particular, to capture complex disease mentions.

This paper presents an LDA-based model that generates topically coherent segments within documents by jointly segmenting documents and assigning topics to their words. The coherence between topics is ensured through a copula, binding the topics associated to the words of a segment. In addition, this model relies on both document and segment specific topic distributions so as to capture fine grained differences in topic assignments. We show that the proposed model naturally encompasses other state-of-the-art LDA-based models designed for similar tasks. Furthermore, our experiments, conducted on six different publicly available datasets, show the effectiveness of our model in terms of perplexity, Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information, which captures the coherence between the generated topics, and the Micro F1 measure for text classification.

The exchangeability assumption in topic models like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) often results in inferring inconsistent topics for the words of text spans like noun-phrases, which are usually expected to be topically coherent. We propose copulaLDA, that extends LDA by integrating part of the text structure to the model and relaxes the conditional independence assumption between the word-specific latent topics given the per-document topic distributions. To this end, we assume that the words of text spans like noun-phrases are topically bound and we model this dependence with copulas. We demonstrate empirically the effectiveness of copulaLDA on both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation tasks on several publicly available corpora.