Xavier Coubez


2024

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Domain-specific or Uncertainty-aware models: Does it really make a difference for biomedical text classification?
Aman Sinha | Timothee Mickus | Marianne Clausel | Mathieu Constant | Xavier Coubez
Proceedings of the 23rd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing

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.