A neuro-symbolic method for understanding free-text medical evidence.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

We introduce Medical evidence Dependency (MD)-informed attention, a novel neuro-symbolic model for understanding free-text clinical trial publications with generalizability and interpretability.

Materials and methods

We trained one head in the multi-head self-attention model to attend to the Medical evidence Ddependency (MD) and to pass linguistic and domain knowledge on to later layers (MD informed). This MD-informed attention model was integrated into BioBERT and tested on 2 public machine reading comprehension benchmarks for clinical trial publications: Evidence Inference 2.0 and PubMedQA. We also curated a small set of recently published articles reporting randomized controlled trials on COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) following the Evidence Inference 2.0 g

SUBMITTER: Kang T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8135980 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature