Comprehensive Study on German Language Models for Clinical and Biomedical Text Understanding

Ahmad Idrissi-Yaghir, Amin Dada, Henning Schäfer, Kamyar Arzideh, Giulia Baldini, Jan Trienes, Max Hasin, Jeanette Bewersdorff, Cynthia S. Schmidt, Marie Bauer, Kaleb E. Smith, Jiang Bian, Yonghui Wu, Jörg Schlötterer, Torsten Zesch, Peter A. Horn, Christin Seifert, Felix Nensa, Jens Kleesiek, Christoph M. Friedrich


Abstract
Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) can be largely attributed to the advent of pre-trained language models such as BERT and RoBERTa. While these models demonstrate remarkable performance on general datasets, they can struggle in specialized domains such as medicine, where unique domain-specific terminologies, domain-specific abbreviations, and varying document structures are common. This paper explores strategies for adapting these models to domain-specific requirements, primarily through continuous pre-training on domain-specific data. We pre-trained several German medical language models on 2.4B tokens derived from translated public English medical data and 3B tokens of German clinical data. The resulting models were evaluated on various German downstream tasks, including named entity recognition (NER), multi-label classification, and extractive question answering. Our results suggest that models augmented by clinical and translation-based pre-training typically outperform general domain models in medical contexts. We conclude that continuous pre-training has demonstrated the ability to match or even exceed the performance of clinical models trained from scratch. Furthermore, pre-training on clinical data or leveraging translated texts have proven to be reliable methods for domain adaptation in medical NLP tasks.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.324
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
3654–3665
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.324
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ahmad Idrissi-Yaghir, Amin Dada, Henning Schäfer, Kamyar Arzideh, Giulia Baldini, Jan Trienes, Max Hasin, Jeanette Bewersdorff, Cynthia S. Schmidt, Marie Bauer, Kaleb E. Smith, Jiang Bian, Yonghui Wu, Jörg Schlötterer, Torsten Zesch, Peter A. Horn, Christin Seifert, Felix Nensa, Jens Kleesiek, et al.. 2024. Comprehensive Study on German Language Models for Clinical and Biomedical Text Understanding. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 3654–3665, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Comprehensive Study on German Language Models for Clinical and Biomedical Text Understanding (Idrissi-Yaghir et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.324.pdf