Evaluation of Dataset Selection for Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning Transformer Language Models for Clinical Question Answering

LREC 2020  ·  Sarvesh Soni, Kirk Roberts ·

We evaluate the performance of various Transformer language models, when pre-trained and fine-tuned on different combinations of open-domain, biomedical, and clinical corpora on two clinical question answering (QA) datasets (CliCR and emrQA). We perform our evaluations on the task of machine reading comprehension, which involves training the model to answer a question given an unstructured context paragraph. We conduct a total of 48 experiments on different combinations of the large open-domain and domain-specific corpora. We found that an initial fine-tuning on an open-domain dataset, SQuAD, consistently improves the clinical QA performance across all the model variants.

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