Medical text classification based on the discriminative pre-training model and prompt-tuning

Medical text classification, as a fundamental medical natural language processing task, aims to identify the categories to which a short medical text belongs. Current research has focused on performing the medical text classification task using a pre-training language model through fine-tuning. Howe...

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Main Authors: Yu Wang, Yuan Wang, Zhenwan Peng, Feifan Zhang, Luyao Zhou, Fei Yang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SAGE Publishing 2023-08-01
Series:Digital Health
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076231193213
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author Yu Wang
Yuan Wang
Zhenwan Peng
Feifan Zhang
Luyao Zhou
Fei Yang
author_facet Yu Wang
Yuan Wang
Zhenwan Peng
Feifan Zhang
Luyao Zhou
Fei Yang
author_sort Yu Wang
collection DOAJ
description Medical text classification, as a fundamental medical natural language processing task, aims to identify the categories to which a short medical text belongs. Current research has focused on performing the medical text classification task using a pre-training language model through fine-tuning. However, this paradigm introduces additional parameters when training extra classifiers. Recent studies have shown that the “prompt-tuning” paradigm induces better performance in many natural language processing tasks because it bridges the gap between pre-training goals and downstream tasks. The main idea of prompt-tuning is to transform binary or multi-classification tasks into mask prediction tasks by fully exploiting the features learned by pre-training language models. This study explores, for the first time, how to classify medical texts using a discriminative pre-training language model called ERNIE-Health through prompt-tuning. Specifically, we attempt to perform prompt-tuning based on the multi-token selection task, which is a pre-training task of ERNIE-Health. The raw text is wrapped into a new sequence with a template in which the category label is replaced by a [UNK] token. The model is then trained to calculate the probability distribution of the candidate categories. Our method is tested on the KUAKE-Question Intention Classification and CHiP-Clinical Trial Criterion datasets and obtains the accuracy values of 0.866 and 0.861. In addition, the loss values of our model decrease faster throughout the training period compared to the fine-tuning. The experimental results provide valuable insights to the community and suggest that prompt-tuning can be a promising approach to improve the performance of pre-training models in domain-specific tasks.
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spelling doaj.art-dcb8c11f73704378a57fb91c10544b2b2023-08-07T17:33:38ZengSAGE PublishingDigital Health2055-20762023-08-01910.1177/20552076231193213Medical text classification based on the discriminative pre-training model and prompt-tuningYu Wang0Yuan Wang1Zhenwan Peng2Feifan Zhang3Luyao Zhou4Fei Yang5 School of Biomedical Engineering, , Hefei, China , Hefei, China School of Biomedical Engineering, , Hefei, China School of Biomedical Engineering, , Hefei, China School of Biomedical Engineering, , Hefei, China School of Biomedical Engineering, , Hefei, ChinaMedical text classification, as a fundamental medical natural language processing task, aims to identify the categories to which a short medical text belongs. Current research has focused on performing the medical text classification task using a pre-training language model through fine-tuning. However, this paradigm introduces additional parameters when training extra classifiers. Recent studies have shown that the “prompt-tuning” paradigm induces better performance in many natural language processing tasks because it bridges the gap between pre-training goals and downstream tasks. The main idea of prompt-tuning is to transform binary or multi-classification tasks into mask prediction tasks by fully exploiting the features learned by pre-training language models. This study explores, for the first time, how to classify medical texts using a discriminative pre-training language model called ERNIE-Health through prompt-tuning. Specifically, we attempt to perform prompt-tuning based on the multi-token selection task, which is a pre-training task of ERNIE-Health. The raw text is wrapped into a new sequence with a template in which the category label is replaced by a [UNK] token. The model is then trained to calculate the probability distribution of the candidate categories. Our method is tested on the KUAKE-Question Intention Classification and CHiP-Clinical Trial Criterion datasets and obtains the accuracy values of 0.866 and 0.861. In addition, the loss values of our model decrease faster throughout the training period compared to the fine-tuning. The experimental results provide valuable insights to the community and suggest that prompt-tuning can be a promising approach to improve the performance of pre-training models in domain-specific tasks.https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076231193213
spellingShingle Yu Wang
Yuan Wang
Zhenwan Peng
Feifan Zhang
Luyao Zhou
Fei Yang
Medical text classification based on the discriminative pre-training model and prompt-tuning
Digital Health
title Medical text classification based on the discriminative pre-training model and prompt-tuning
title_full Medical text classification based on the discriminative pre-training model and prompt-tuning
title_fullStr Medical text classification based on the discriminative pre-training model and prompt-tuning
title_full_unstemmed Medical text classification based on the discriminative pre-training model and prompt-tuning
title_short Medical text classification based on the discriminative pre-training model and prompt-tuning
title_sort medical text classification based on the discriminative pre training model and prompt tuning
url https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076231193213
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