StatBot.Swiss: Bilingual Open Data Exploration in Natural Language

The potential for improvements brought by Large Language Models (LLMs) in Text-to-SQL systems is mostly assessed on monolingual English datasets. However, LLMs' performance for other languages remains vastly unexplored. In this work, we release the StatBot.Swiss dataset, the first bilingual benchmark for evaluating Text-to-SQL systems based on real-world applications. The StatBot.Swiss dataset contains 455 natural language/SQL-pairs over 35 big databases with varying level of complexity for both English and German. We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs such as GPT-3.5-Turbo and mixtral-8x7b-instruct for the Text-to-SQL translation task using an in-context learning approach. Our experimental analysis illustrates that current LLMs struggle to generalize well in generating SQL queries on our novel bilingual dataset.

Radiology-Aware Model-Based Evaluation Metric for Report Generation

We propose a new automated evaluation metric for machine-generated radiology reports using the successful COMET architecture adapted for the radiology domain. We train and publish four medically-oriented model checkpoints, including one trained on RadGraph, a radiology knowledge graph. Our results show that our metric correlates moderately to high with established metrics such as BERTscore, BLEU, and CheXbert scores. Furthermore, we demonstrate that one of our checkpoints exhibits a high correlation with human judgment, as assessed using the publicly available annotations of six board-certified radiologists, using a set of 200 reports. We also performed our own analysis gathering annotations with two radiologists on a collection of 100 reports. The results indicate the potential effectiveness of our method as a radiology-specific evaluation metric. The code, data, and model checkpoints to reproduce our findings will be publicly available.

Boosting Radiology Report Generation by Infusing Comparison Prior

Current transformer-based models achieved great success in generating radiology reports from chest X-ray images. Nonetheless, one of the major issues is the model's lack of prior knowledge, which frequently leads to false references to non-existent prior exams in synthetic reports. This is mainly due to the knowledge gap between radiologists and the generation models: radiologists are aware of the prior information of patients to write a medical report, while models only receive X-ray images at a specific time. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach that employs a labeler to extract comparison prior information from radiology reports in the IU X-ray and MIMIC-CXR datasets. This comparison prior is then incorporated into state-of-the-art transformer-based models, allowing them to generate more realistic and comprehensive reports. We test our method on the IU X-ray and MIMIC-CXR datasets and find that it outperforms previous state-of-the-art models in terms of both automatic and human evaluation metrics. In addition, unlike previous models, our model generates reports that do not contain false references to non-existent prior exams. Our approach provides a promising direction for bridging the gap between radiologists and generation models in medical report generation.

Exploratory Analysis of Federated Learning Methods with Differential Privacy on MIMIC-III

Background: Federated learning methods offer the possibility of training machine learning models on privacy-sensitive data sets, which cannot be easily shared. Multiple regulations pose strict requirements on the storage and usage of healthcare data, leading to data being in silos (i.e. locked-in at healthcare facilities). The application of federated algorithms on these datasets could accelerate disease diagnostic, drug development, as well as improve patient care. Methods: We present an extensive evaluation of the impact of different federation and differential privacy techniques when training models on the open-source MIMIC-III dataset. We analyze a set of parameters influencing a federated model performance, namely data distribution (homogeneous and heterogeneous), communication strategies (communication rounds vs. local training epochs), federation strategies (FedAvg vs. FedProx). Furthermore, we assess and compare two differential privacy (DP) techniques during model training: a stochastic gradient descent-based differential privacy algorithm (DP-SGD), and a sparse vector differential privacy technique (DP-SVT). Results: Our experiments show that extreme data distributions across sites (imbalance either in the number of patients or the positive label ratios between sites) lead to a deterioration of model performance when trained using the FedAvg strategy. This issue is resolved when using FedProx with the use of appropriate hyperparameter tuning. Furthermore, the results show that both differential privacy techniques can reach model performances similar to those of models trained without DP, however at the expense of a large quantifiable privacy leakage. Conclusions: We evaluate empirically the benefits of two federation strategies and propose optimal strategies for the choice of parameters when using differential privacy techniques.

Improving the Cross-Lingual Generalisation in Visual Question Answering

While several benefits were realized for multilingual vision-language pretrained models, recent benchmarks across various tasks and languages showed poor cross-lingual generalisation when multilingually pre-trained vision-language models are applied to non-English data, with a large gap between (supervised) English performance and (zero-shot) cross-lingual transfer. In this work, we explore the poor performance of these models on a zero-shot cross-lingual visual question answering (VQA) task, where models are fine-tuned on English visual-question data and evaluated on 7 typologically diverse languages. We improve cross-lingual transfer with three strategies: (1) we introduce a linguistic prior objective to augment the cross-entropy loss with a similarity-based loss to guide the model during training, (2) we learn a task-specific subnetwork that improves cross-lingual generalisation and reduces variance without model modification, (3) we augment training examples using synthetic code-mixing to promote alignment of embeddings between source and target languages. Our experiments on xGQA using the pretrained multilingual multimodal transformers UC2 and M3P demonstrate the consistent effectiveness of the proposed fine-tuning strategy for 7 languages, outperforming existing transfer methods with sparse models. Code and data to reproduce our findings are publicly available.

Progressive Transformer-Based Generation of Radiology Reports

Inspired by Curriculum Learning, we propose a consecutive (i.e. image-to-text-to-text) generation framework where we divide the problem of radiology report generation into two steps. Contrary to generating the full radiology report from the image at once, the model generates global concepts from the image in the first step and then reforms them into finer and coherent texts using transformer-based architecture. We follow the transformer-based sequence-to-sequence paradigm at each step. We improve upon the state-of-the-art on two benchmark datasets.

Low-Resource Adaptation of Neural NLP Models

Real-world applications of natural language processing (NLP) are challenging. NLP models rely heavily on supervised machine learning and require large amounts of annotated data. These resources are often based on language data available in large quantities, such as English newswire. However, in real-world applications of NLP, the textual resources vary across several dimensions, such as language, dialect, topic, and genre. It is challenging to find annotated data of sufficient amount and quality. The objective of this thesis is to investigate methods for dealing with such low-resource scenarios in information extraction and natural language understanding. To this end, we study distant supervision and sequential transfer learning in various low-resource settings. We develop and adapt neural NLP models to explore a number of research questions concerning NLP tasks with minimal or no training data.

Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer with Meta Learning

Learning what to share between tasks has been a topic of great importance recently, as strategic sharing of knowledge has been shown to improve the performance of downstream tasks. In multilingual applications, sharing of knowledge between languages is important when considering the fact that most languages in the world suffer from being under-resourced. In this paper, we consider the setting of training models on multiple different languages at the same time, when English training data, but little or no in-language data is available. We show that this challenging setup can be approached using meta-learning, where, in addition to training a source language model, another model learns to select which training instances are the most beneficial. We experiment using standard supervised, zero-shot cross-lingual, as well as few-shot cross-lingual settings for different natural language understanding tasks (natural language inference, question answering). Our extensive experimental setup demonstrates the consistent effectiveness of meta-learning in a total of 16 languages. We improve upon the state-of-the-art for zero-shot and few-shot NLI and QA tasks on two NLI datasets (i.e., MultiNLI and XNLI), and on the X-WikiRE dataset, respectively. We further conduct a comprehensive analysis, which indicates that the correlation of typological features between languages can further explain when parameter sharing learned via meta-learning is beneficial.

Syntactic Dependency Representations in Neural Relation Classification

We investigate the use of different syntactic dependency representations in a neural relation classification task and compare the CoNLL, Stanford Basic and Universal Dependencies schemes. We further compare with a syntax-agnostic approach and perform an error analysis in order to gain a better understanding of the results.

SIRIUS-LTG-UiO at SemEval-2018 Task 7: Convolutional Neural Networks with Shortest Dependency Paths for Semantic Relation Extraction and Classification in Scientific Papers

This article presents the SIRIUS-LTG-UiO system for the SemEval 2018 Task 7 on Semantic Relation Extraction and Classification in Scientific Papers. First we extract the shortest dependency path (sdp) between two entities, then we introduce a convolutional neural network (CNN) which takes the shortest dependency path embeddings as input and performs relation classification with differing objectives for each subtask of the shared task. This approach achieved overall F1 scores of 76.7 and 83.2 for relation classification on clean and noisy data, respectively. Furthermore, for combined relation extraction and classification on clean data, it obtained F1 scores of 37.4 and 33.6 for each phase. Our system ranks 3rd in all three sub-tasks of the shared task.