arXiv subjects

Eric Fosler-Lussier

Publications and source records attributed to Eric Fosler-Lussier.

39 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Insights into Analogy Completion from the Biomedical Domain

Analogy completion has been a popular task in recent years for evaluating the semantic properties of word embeddings, but the standard methodology makes a number of assumptions about analogies that do not always hold, either in recent benchmark datasets or when expanding into other domains. Through an analysis of analogies in the biomedical domain, we identify three assumptions: that of a Single Answer for any given analogy, that the pairs involved describe the Same Relationship, and that each pair is Informative with respect to the other. We propose modifying the standard methodology to relax these assumptions by allowing for multiple correct answers, reporting MAP and MRR in addition to accuracy, and using multiple example pairs. We further present BMASS, a novel dataset for evaluating linguistic regularities in biomedical embeddings, and demonstrate that the relationships described in the dataset pose significant semantic challenges to current word embedding methods.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2017

Second-Order Word Embeddings from Nearest Neighbor Topological Features

We introduce second-order vector representations of words, induced from nearest neighborhood topological features in pre-trained contextual word embeddings. We then analyze the effects of using second-order embeddings as input features in two deep natural language processing models, for named entity recognition and recognizing textual entailment, as well as a linear model for paraphrase recognition. Surprisingly, we find that nearest neighbor information alone is sufficient to capture most of the performance benefits derived from using pre-trained word embeddings. Furthermore, second-order embeddings are able to handle highly heterogeneous data better than first-order representations, though at the cost of some specificity. Additionally, augmenting contextual embeddings with second-order information further improves model performance in some cases. Due to variance in the random initializations of word embeddings, utilizing nearest neighbor features from multiple first-order embedding samples can also contribute to downstream performance gains. Finally, we identify intriguing characteristics of second-order embedding spaces for further research, including much higher density and different semantic interpretations of cosine similarity.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2015

How essential are unstructured clinical narratives and information fusion to clinical trial recruitment?

Electronic health records capture patient information using structured controlled vocabularies and unstructured narrative text. While structured data typically encodes lab values, encounters and medication lists, unstructured data captures the physician's interpretation of the patient's condition, prognosis, and response to therapeutic intervention. In this paper, we demonstrate that information extraction from unstructured clinical narratives is essential to most clinical applications. We perform an empirical study to validate the argument and show that structured data alone is insufficient in resolving eligibility criteria for recruiting patients onto clinical trials for chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and prostate cancer. Unstructured data is essential to solving 59% of the CLL trial criteria and 77% of the prostate cancer trial criteria. More specifically, for resolving eligibility criteria with temporal constraints, we show the need for temporal reasoning and information integration with medical events within and across unstructured clinical narratives and structured data.

cs.CY↗