Healthcare professionals rely on evidence from clinical trial records (CTRs) to devise treatment plans. However, the increasing quantity of CTRs poses challenges in efficiently assimilating the latest evidence to provide personalized evidence-based care. In this paper, we present our solution to the SemEval- 2024 Task 2 titled “Safe Biomedical Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trials”. Given a statement and one/two CTRs as inputs, the task is to determine whether or not the statement entails or contradicts the CTRs. We explore both generative and discriminative large language models (LLM) to investigate their performance for clinical inference. Moreover, we contrast the general-purpose LLMs with the ones specifically tailored for the clinical domain to study the potential advantage in mitigating distributional shifts. Furthermore, the benefit of augmenting additional knowledge within the prompt/statement is examined in this work. Our empirical study suggests that DeBERTa-lg, a discriminative general-purpose natural language inference model, obtains the highest F1 score of 0.77 on the test set, securing the fourth rank on the leaderboard. Intriguingly, the augmentation of knowledge yields subpar results across most cases.

Given a word in context, the task of VisualWord Sense Disambiguation consists of select-ing the correct image among a set of candidates. To select the correct image, we propose a so-lution blending text augmentation and multi-modal models. Text augmentation leverages thefine-grained semantic annotation from Word-Net to get a better representation of the tex-tual component. We then compare this sense-augmented text to the set of image using pre-trained multimodal models CLIP and ViLT. Oursystem has been ranked 16th for the Englishlanguage, achieving 68.5 points for hit rate and79.2 for mean reciprocal rank.