TOP-Training: Target-Oriented Pretraining for Medical Extractive Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Sengupta, Saptarshi, Heaton, Connor, Ghosh, Shreya, Yin, Wenpeng, Nakov, Preslav, Wang, Suhang
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Sengupta, Saptarshi
Heaton, Connor
Ghosh, Shreya
Yin, Wenpeng
Nakov, Preslav
Wang, Suhang
author_facet Sengupta, Saptarshi
Heaton, Connor
Ghosh, Shreya
Yin, Wenpeng
Nakov, Preslav
Wang, Suhang
contents We study extractive question-answering in the medical domain (Medical-EQA). This problem has two main challenges: (i) domain specificity, as most AI models lack necessary domain knowledge, and (ii) extraction-based answering style, which restricts most autoregressive LLMs due to potential hallucinations. To handle those challenges, we propose TOP-Training, a target-oriented pre-training paradigm that stands out among all domain adaptation techniques with two desirable features: (i) TOP-Training moves one step further than popular domain-oriented fine-tuning since it not only moves closer to the target domain, but also familiarizes itself with the target dataset, and (ii) it does not assume the existence of a large set of unlabeled instances from the target domain. Specifically, for a target Medical-EQA dataset, we extract its entities and leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate synthetic texts containing those entities; we then demonstrate that pretraining on this synthetic text data yields better performance on the target Medical-EQA benchmarks. Overall, our contributions are threefold: (i) TOP-Training, a new pretraining technique to effectively adapt LLMs to better solve a target problem, (ii) TOP-Training has a wide application scope because it does not require the target problem to have a large set of unlabeled data, and (iii) our experiments highlight the limitations of autoregressive LLMs, emphasizing TOP-Training as a means to unlock the true potential of bidirectional LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_16995
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TOP-Training: Target-Oriented Pretraining for Medical Extractive Question Answering
Sengupta, Saptarshi
Heaton, Connor
Ghosh, Shreya
Yin, Wenpeng
Nakov, Preslav
Wang, Suhang
Computation and Language
We study extractive question-answering in the medical domain (Medical-EQA). This problem has two main challenges: (i) domain specificity, as most AI models lack necessary domain knowledge, and (ii) extraction-based answering style, which restricts most autoregressive LLMs due to potential hallucinations. To handle those challenges, we propose TOP-Training, a target-oriented pre-training paradigm that stands out among all domain adaptation techniques with two desirable features: (i) TOP-Training moves one step further than popular domain-oriented fine-tuning since it not only moves closer to the target domain, but also familiarizes itself with the target dataset, and (ii) it does not assume the existence of a large set of unlabeled instances from the target domain. Specifically, for a target Medical-EQA dataset, we extract its entities and leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate synthetic texts containing those entities; we then demonstrate that pretraining on this synthetic text data yields better performance on the target Medical-EQA benchmarks. Overall, our contributions are threefold: (i) TOP-Training, a new pretraining technique to effectively adapt LLMs to better solve a target problem, (ii) TOP-Training has a wide application scope because it does not require the target problem to have a large set of unlabeled data, and (iii) our experiments highlight the limitations of autoregressive LLMs, emphasizing TOP-Training as a means to unlock the true potential of bidirectional LLMs.
title TOP-Training: Target-Oriented Pretraining for Medical Extractive Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.16995