Grammatical error correction (GEC) is a promising task aimed at correcting errors in a text. Many methods have been proposed to facilitate this task with remarkable results. However, most of them only focus on enhancing textual feature extraction without exploring the usage of other modalities’ information (e.g., speech), which can also provide valuable knowledge to help the model detect grammatical errors. To shore up this deficiency, we propose a novel framework that integrates both speech and text features to enhance GEC. In detail, we create new multimodal GEC datasets for English and German by generating audio from text using the advanced text-to-speech models. Subsequently, we extract acoustic and textual representations by a multimodal encoder that consists of a speech and a text encoder. A mixture-of-experts (MoE) layer is employed to selectively align representations from the two modalities, and then a dot attention mechanism is used to fuse them as final multimodal representations. Experimental results on CoNLL14, BEA19 English, and Falko-MERLIN German show that our multimodal GEC models achieve significant improvements over strong baselines and achieve a new state-of-the-art result on the Falko-MERLIN test set.

The impression is crucial for the referring physicians to grasp key information since it is concluded from the findings and reasoning of radiologists. To alleviate the workload of radiologists and reduce repetitive human labor in impression writing, many researchers have focused on automatic impression generation. However, recent works on this task mainly summarize the corresponding findings and pay less attention to the radiology images. In clinical, radiographs can provide more detailed valuable observations to enhance radiologists’ impression writing, especially for complicated cases. Besides, each sentence in findings usually focuses on single anatomy, such that they only need to be matched to corresponding anatomical regions instead of the whole image, which is beneficial for textual and visual features alignment. Therefore, we propose a novel anatomy-enhanced multimodal model to promote impression generation. In detail, we first construct a set of rules to extract anatomies and put these prompts into each sentence to highlight anatomy characteristics. Then, two separate encoders are applied to extract features from the radiograph and findings. Afterward, we utilize a contrastive learning module to align these two representations at the overall level and use a co-attention to fuse them at the sentence level with the help of anatomy-enhanced sentence representation. The experimental results on two benchmark datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, which achieves state-of-the-art results.

Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental and important task in NLP, aiming at identifying named entities (NEs) from free text. Recently, since the multi-head attention mechanism applied in the Transformer model can effectively capture longer contextual information, Transformer-based models have become the mainstream methods and have achieved significant performance in this task. Unfortunately, although these models can capture effective global context information, they are still limited in the local feature and position information extraction, which is critical in NER. In this paper, to address this limitation, we propose a novel Hero-Gang Neural structure (HGN), including the Hero and Gang module, to leverage both global and local information to promote NER. Specifically, the Hero module is composed of a Transformer-based encoder to maintain the advantage of the self-attention mechanism, and the Gang module utilizes a multi-window recurrent module to extract local features and position information under the guidance of the Hero module. Afterward, the proposed multi-window attention effectively combines global information and multiple local features for predicting entity labels. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

The impression section of a radiology report summarizes the most prominent observation from the findings section and is the most important section for radiologists to communicate to physicians. Summarizing findings is time-consuming and can be prone to error for inexperienced radiologists, and thus automatic impression generation has attracted substantial attention. With the encoder-decoder framework, most previous studies explore incorporating extra knowledge (e.g., static pre-defined clinical ontologies or extra background information). Yet, they encode such knowledge by a separate encoder to treat it as an extra input to their models, which is limited in leveraging their relations with the original findings. To address the limitation, we propose a unified framework for exploiting both extra knowledge and the original findings in an integrated way so that the critical information (i.e., key words and their relations) can be extracted in an appropriate way to facilitate impression generation. In detail, for each input findings, it is encoded by a text encoder and a graph is constructed through its entities and dependency tree. Then, a graph encoder (e.g., graph neural networks (GNNs)) is adopted to model relation information in the constructed graph. Finally, to emphasize the key words in the findings, contrastive learning is introduced to map positive samples (constructed by masking non-key words) closer and push apart negative ones (constructed by masking key words). The experimental results on two datasets, OpenI and MIMIC-CXR, confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method, where the state-of-the-art results are achieved.

Few-Shot Relation Extraction aims at predicting the relation for a pair of entities in a sentence by training with a few labelled examples in each relation. Some recent works have introduced relation information (i.e., relation labels or descriptions) to assist model learning based on Prototype Network. However, most of them constrain the prototypes of each relation class implicitly with relation information, generally through designing complex network structures, like generating hybrid features, combining with contrastive learning or attention networks. We argue that relation information can be introduced more explicitly and effectively into the model. Thus, this paper proposes a direct addition approach to introduce relation information. Specifically, for each relation class, the relation representation is first generated by concatenating two views of relations (i.e., [CLS] token embedding and the mean value of embeddings of all tokens) and then directly added to the original prototype for both train and prediction. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset FewRel 1.0 show significant improvements and achieve comparable results to the state-of-the-art, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Besides, further analyses verify that the direct addition is a much more effective way to integrate the relation representations and the original prototypes.

Few-shot Relation Extraction refers to fast adaptation to novel relation classes with few samples through training on the known relation classes. Most existing methods focus on implicitly introducing relation information (i.e., relation label or relation description) to constrain the prototype representation learning, such as contrastive learning, graphs, and specifically designed attentions, which may bring useless and even harmful parameters. Besides, these approaches are limited in handing outlier samples far away from the class center due to the weakly implicit constraint. In this paper, we propose an effective and parameter-less Prototype Rectification Method (PRM) to promote few-shot relation extraction, where we utilize a prototype rectification module to rectify original prototypes explicitly by the relation information. Specifically, PRM is composed of two gate mechanisms. One gate decides how much of the original prototype remains, and another one updates the remained prototype with relation information. In doing so, better and stabler global relation information can be captured for guiding prototype representations, and thus PRM can robustly deal with outliers. Moreover, we also extend PRM to both none-of-the-above (NOTA) and domain adaptation scenarios. Experimental results on FewRel 1.0 and 2.0 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Cross-domain named entity recognition (NER) aims to borrow the entity information from the source domain to help the entity recognition in the target domain with limited labeled data. Despite the promising performance of existing approaches, most of them focus on reducing the discrepancy of token representation between source and target domains, while the transfer of the valuable label information is often not explicitly considered or even ignored. Therefore, we propose a novel autoregressive framework to advance cross-domain NER by first enhancing the relationship between labels and tokens and then further improving the transferability of label information. Specifically, we associate each label with an embedding vector, and for each token, we utilize a bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) to encode the labels of its previous tokens for modeling internal context information and label dependence. Afterward, we propose a Bi-Attention module that merges the token representation from a pre-trained model and the label features from the Bi-LSTM as the label-aware information, which is concatenated to the token representation to facilitate cross-domain NER. In doing so, label information contained in the embedding vectors can be effectively transferred to the target domain, and Bi-LSTM can further model the label relationship among different domains by pre-train and then fine-tune setting. Experimental results on several datasets confirm the effectiveness of our model, where our model achieves significant improvements over the state of the arts.

Chinese word segmentation (CWS) and medical concept recognition are two fundamental tasks to process Chinese electronic medical records (EMRs) and play important roles in downstream tasks for understanding Chinese EMRs. One challenge to these tasks is the lack of medical domain datasets with high-quality annotations, especially medical-related tags that reveal the characteristics of Chinese EMRs. In this paper, we collected a Chinese EMR corpus, namely, ACEMR, with human annotations for Chinese word segmentation and EMR-related tags. On the ACEMR corpus, we run well-known models (i.e., BiLSTM, BERT, and ZEN) and existing state-of-the-art systems (e.g., WMSeg and TwASP) for CWS and medical concept recognition. Experimental results demonstrate the necessity of building a dedicated medical dataset and show that models that leverage extra resources achieve the best performance for both tasks, which provides certain guidance for future studies on model selection in the medical domain.

Medical imaging is frequently used in clinical practice and trials for diagnosis and treatment. Writing imaging reports is time-consuming and can be error-prone for inexperienced radiologists. Therefore, automatically generating radiology reports is highly desired to lighten the workload of radiologists and accordingly promote clinical automation, which is an essential task to apply artificial intelligence to the medical domain. In this paper, we propose to generate radiology reports with memory-driven Transformer, where a relational memory is designed to record key information of the generation process and a memory-driven conditional layer normalization is applied to incorporating the memory into the decoder of Transformer. Experimental results on two prevailing radiology report datasets, IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR, show that our proposed approach outperforms previous models with respect to both language generation metrics and clinical evaluations. Particularly, this is the first work reporting the generation results on MIMIC-CXR to the best of our knowledge. Further analyses also demonstrate that our approach is able to generate long reports with necessary medical terms as well as meaningful image-text attention mappings.