Temporal relation extraction in medical document analysis is crucial for understanding patient histories and treatment outcomes. This paper introduces a novel approach leveraging a bimodal model integrating textual content and a knowledge graph, to enhance temporal relation extraction. The paper presents ongoing research in constructing an optimal knowledge graph by augmenting PrimeKG with dynamically expanded information using a language model-generated knowledge graph, and further personalize the information with patient-specific graphs tailored for relation prediction. The pipeline for constructing this enriched knowledge graph is detailed, aiming to improve the capabilities of temporal relation extraction models. The preliminary results show that adding a simple knowledge graph to the temporal relation extraction model can significantly increase the performance, achieving new state-of-the-art results. While the research in using enhanced knowledge graphs is still ongoing, this paper lays the groundwork for leveraging common knowledge to advance temporal relation extraction in medical contexts. This approach holds promise for enhancing the understanding of patient histories and treatment outcomes, potentially leading to improved healthcare decision-making and patient care.

Understanding the relation between the meanings of words is an important part of comprehending natural language. Prior work has either focused on analysing lexical semantic relations in word embeddings or probing pretrained language models (PLMs), with some exceptions. Given the rarity of highly multilingual benchmarks, it is unclear to what extent PLMs capture relational knowledge and are able to transfer it across languages. To start addressing this question, we propose MultiLexBATS, a multilingual parallel dataset of lexical semantic relations adapted from BATS in 15 languages including low-resource languages, such as Bambara, Lithuanian, and Albanian. As experiment on cross-lingual transfer of relational knowledge, we test the PLMs’ ability to (1) capture analogies across languages, and (2) predict translation targets. We find considerable differences across relation types and languages with a clear preference for hypernymy and antonymy as well as romance languages.