Mexico

The 2024 Shared Task on Chemotherapy Treatment Timeline Extraction aims to advance the state of the art of clinical event timeline extraction from the Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Specifically, this edition focuses on chemotherapy event timelines from EHRs of patients with breast, ovarian and skin cancers. These patient-level timelines present a novel challenge which involves tasks such as the extraction of relevant events, time expressions and temporal relations from each document and then summarizing over the documents. De-identified EHRs for 57,530 patients with breast and ovarian cancer spanning 2004-2020, and approximately 15,946 patients with melanoma spanning 2010-2020 were made available to participants after executing a Data Use Agreement. A subset of patients is annotated for gold entities, time expressions, temporal relations and patient-level timelines. The rest is considered unlabeled data. In Subtask1, gold chemotherapy event mentions and time expressions are provided (along with the EHR notes). Participants are asked to build the patient-level timelines using gold annotations as input. Thus, the subtask seeks to explore the topics of temporal relations extraction and timeline creation if event and time expression input is perfect. In Subtask2, which is the realistic real-world setting, only EHR notes are provided. Thus, the subtask aims at developing an end-to-end system for chemotherapy treatment timeline extraction from patient&#39;s EHR notes. There were 18 submissions for Subtask 1 and 9 submissions for Subtask 2. The organizers provided a baseline system. The teams employed a variety of methods including Logistic Regression, TF-IDF, n-grams, transformer models, zero-shot prompting with Large Language Models (LLMs), and instruction tuning. The gap in performance between prompting LLMs and finetuning smaller-sized LMs indicates that for a challenging task such as patient-level chemotherapy timeline extraction, more sophisticated LLMs or prompting techniques are necessary in order to achieve optimal results as finetuing smaller-sized LMs outperforms by a wide margin.

NAACL 2024

Overview of the 2024 Shared Task on Chemotherapy Treatment Timeline Extraction

ehrs

chemotherapy treatment

timelines

The 2024 Shared Task on Chemotherapy Treatment Timeline Extraction aims to advance the state of the art of clinical event timeline extraction from the Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Specifically, this edition focuses on chemotherapy event timelines from EHRs of patients with breast, ovarian and skin cancers. These patient-level timelines present a novel challenge which involves tasks such as the extraction of relevant events, time expressions and temporal relations from each document and then summarizing over the documents. De-identified EHRs for 57,530 patients with breast and ovarian cancer spanning 2004-2020, and approximately 15,946 patients with melanoma spanning 2010-2020 were made available to participants after executing a Data Use Agreement. A subset of patients is annotated for gold entities, time expressions, temporal relations and patient-level timelines. The rest is considered unlabeled data. In Subtask1, gold chemotherapy event mentions and time expressions are provided (along with the EHR notes). Participants are asked to build the patient-level timelines using gold annotations as input. Thus, the subtask seeks to explore the topics of temporal relations extraction and timeline creation if event and time expression input is perfect. In Subtask2, which is the realistic real-world setting, only EHR notes are provided. Thus, the subtask aims at developing an end-to-end system for chemotherapy treatment timeline extraction from patient's EHR notes. There were 18 submissions for Subtask 1 and 9 submissions for Subtask 2. The organizers provided a baseline system. The teams employed a variety of methods including Logistic Regression, TF-IDF, n-grams, transformer models, zero-shot prompting with Large Language Models (LLMs), and instruction tuning. The gap in performance between prompting LLMs and finetuning smaller-sized LMs indicates that for a challenging task such as patient-level chemotherapy timeline extraction, more sophisticated LLMs or prompting techniques are necessary in order to achieve optimal results as finetuing smaller-sized LMs outperforms by a wide margin.

workshop paper

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

In natural language processing applied to the clinical domain, utilizing large language models has emerged as a promising avenue for error detection and correction on clinical notes, a knowledge-intensive task for which annotated data is scarce. This paper presents MedReAct'N'MedReFlex, which leverages a suite of four LLM-based medical agents. The MedReAct agent initiates the process by observing, analyzing, and taking action, generating trajectories to guide the search to target a potential error in the clinical notes. Subsequently, the MedEval agent employs five evaluators to assess the targeted error and the proposed correction. In cases where MedReAct's actions prove insufficient, the MedReFlex agent intervenes, engaging in reflective analysis and proposing alternative strategies. Finally, the MedFinalParser agent formats the final output, preserving the original style while ensuring the integrity of the error correction process. One core component of our method is our RAG pipeline based on our ClinicalCorp corpora. Among other well-known sources containing clinical guidelines and information, we preprocess and release the open-source MedWiki dataset for clinical RAG application. Our results demonstrate the central role of our RAG approach with ClinicalCorp leveraged through the MedReAct'N'MedReFlex framework. It achieved the ninth rank on the MEDIQA-CORR 2024 final leaderboard.

IryoNLP at MEDIQA-CORR 2024: Tackling the Medical Error Detection & Correction Task on the Shoulders of Medical Agents

This paper presents our approach for the 2024 ChemoTimelines shared task. Specifically, we explored using Large Language Models (LLMs) for temporal relation extraction. We evaluate multiple model variations based on how the training data is used. For instance, we transform the task into a question-answering problem and use QA pairs to extract chemo-related events and their temporal relations. Next, we add all the documents to each question-answer pair as examples in our training dataset. Finally, we explore adding unlabeled data for continued pretraining. Each addition is done iteratively. Our results show that adding the document helps, but unlabeled data does not yield performance improvements, possibly because we used only 1\% of the available data. Moreover, we find that instruction-tuned models still substantially underperform more traditional systems (e.g., EntityBERT).

UTSA-NLP at ChemoTimelines 2024: Evaluating Instruction-Tuned Language Models for Temporal Relation Extraction

This paper outlines our submission to the MEDIQA2024 Multilingual and Multimodal Medical Answer Generation (M3G) shared task. We report results for two standalone solutions under the English category of the task, the first involving two consecutive API calls to the Claude 3 Opus API and the second involving training an image-disease label joint embedding in the style of CLIP for image classification. These two solutions scored 1st and 2nd place respectively on the competition leaderboard, substantially outperforming the next best solution. Additionally, we discuss insights gained from post-competition experiments. While the performance of these two described solutions have significant room for improvement due to the difficulty of the shared task and the challenging nature of medical visual question answering in general, we identify the multi-stage LLM approach and the CLIP image classification approach as promising avenues for further investigation.

WangLab at MEDIQA-M3G 2024: Multimodal Medical Answer Generation using Large Language Models

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are relational databases that store the entire medical histories of patients within hospitals. They record numerous aspects of patients' medical care, from hospital admission and diagnosis to treatment and discharge. While EHRs are vital sources of clinical data, exploring them beyond a predefined set of queries requires skills in query languages like SQL. To make information retrieval more accessible, one strategy is to build a question-answering system, possibly leveraging text-to-SQL models that can automatically translate natural language questions into corresponding SQL queries and use these queries to retrieve the answers. The EHRSQL 2024 shared task aims to advance and promote research in developing a question-answering system for EHRs using text-to-SQL modeling, capable of reliably providing requested answers to various healthcare professionals to improve their clinical work processes and satisfy their needs. Among more than 100 participants who applied to the shared task, eight teams completed the entire shared task processes and demonstrated a wide range of methods to effectively solve this task. In this paper, we describe the task of reliable text-to-SQL modeling, the dataset, and the methods and results of the participants. We hope this shared task will spur further research and insights into developing reliable question-answering systems for EHRs.

Overview of the EHRSQL 2024 Shared Task on Reliable Text-to-SQL Modeling on Electronic Health Records

The EHRSQL task aims to develop a dependable text-to-SQL model for Electronic Health Records (EHR) databases, which are crucial sources of clinical data that store patients' medical histories in hospitals. Large language models (LLM) have been proven to exhibit state-of-the-art performance for text-to-SQL tasks across various domains. To this end, we have developed a framework, SQL Generation through Classification Answer Selector by LLM (SCAS), which comprises two modules. The CAS module determines the answerability of the question, while the SG model generates the SQL query exclusively for answerable questions. Our system ranked 7th on the leaderboard with a Reliability Score of 53.21 on the official test set.

Saama Technologies at EHRSQL 2024: SQL Generation through Classification Answer Selector by LLM

Recently, deep learning-based language models have significantly enhanced text-to-SQL tasks, with promising applications in retrieving patient records within the medical domain. One notable challenge in such applications is discerning unanswerable queries. Through fine-tuning model, we demonstrate the feasibility of converting medical record inquiries into SQL queries. Additionally, we introduce an entropy-based method to identify and filter out unanswerable results. We further enhance result quality by filtering low-confidence SQL through log probability-based distribution, while grammatical and schema errors are mitigated by executing queries on the actual database.
We experimentally verified that our method can filter unanswerable questions, which can be widely utilized even when the parameters of the model are not accessible, and that it can be effectively utilized in practice.

ProbGate at EHRSQL 2024: Enhancing SQL Query Generation Accuracy through Probabilistic Threshold Filtering and Error Handling

As the media landscape evolves, the study of news framing, key to shaping public opinion, has expanded. Our study presents a methodology for framing analysis in Spanish media using NLP to uncover the cultural and political factors shaping narratives. This method enhances linguistic inclusivity in framing studies and highlights Spanish media's role in public opinion, showing NLP's utility in diverse linguistic contexts and contributing to a more comprehensive global media analysis.

Cross-Linguistic Framing Analysis: Unveiling Political and Cultural Narratives in Spanish-Language News

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful capabilities in natural language processing, yet their vast number of parameters poses challenges for deployment and inference efficiency. Structured model pruning emerges as a viable approach to reduce model size and accelerate inference, without requiring specialized operators and libraries for deployment. However, structured pruning often severely weakens the model's capability.Despite repetitive fine-tuning can restore the capability to a certain extent, it impairs LLMs' utility as versatile problem solvers.To address this issue, we propose a novel structured pruning algorithm tailored for LLMs. It derives the importance of different components, namely rows and columns in parameter matrices, based on intermediate data dependencies. Then it removes coupled components across different layers simultaneously and preserves dependency relationships within remaining parameters, avoiding significant performance degradation. The pruned model requires only few epochs of fine-tuning to restore its performance, ensuring the model's ability to generalize.Empirical evaluations on LLaMA, Vicuna, and ChatGLM3 demonstrate our algorithm's efficacy, yielding 20% parameter reduction while retaining at least 94.4% of original performance metrics.

Structured Pruning for Large Language Models Using Coupled Components Elimination and Minor Fine-tuning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency in language understanding and have been successfully applied to a variety of real-world tasks through task-specific fine-tuning or prompt engineering. Despite these advancements, it remains an open question whether LLMs are fundamentally capable of reasoning and planning, or if they primarily rely on recalling and synthesizing information from their training data. In our research, we introduce a novel task---Minesweeper---specifically designed in a format unfamiliar to LLMs and absent from their training datasets. This task challenges LLMs to identify the locations of mines based on numerical clues provided by adjacent opened cells. Successfully completing this task requires an understanding of each cell's state, discerning spatial relationships between the clues and mines, and strategizing actions based on logical deductions drawn from the arrangement of the cells. Our experiments, including trials with the advanced GPT-4 model, indicate that while LLMs possess the foundational abilities required for this task, they struggle to integrate these into a coherent, multi-step logical reasoning process needed to solve Minesweeper. These findings highlight the need for further research to understand the nature of reasoning capabilities in LLMs under similar circumstances, and to explore pathways towards more sophisticated AI reasoning and planning models.

Assessing Logical Puzzle Solving in Large Language Models: Insights from a Minesweeper Case Study

Consistency regularization methods, such as R-Drop (Liang et al., 2021) and CrossConST (Gao et al., 2023), have achieved impressive supervised and zero-shot performance in the neural machine translation (NMT) field. Can we also boost end-to-end (E2E) speech-to-text translation (ST) by leveraging consistency regularization? In this paper, we conduct empirical studies on intra-modal and cross-modal consistency and propose two training strategies, SimRegCR and SimZeroCR, for E2E ST in regular and zero-shot scenarios. Experiments on the MuST-C benchmark show that our approaches achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in most translation directions. The analyses prove that regularization brought by the intra-modal consistency, instead of the modality gap, is crucial for the regular E2E ST, and the cross-modal consistency could close the modality gap and boost the zero-shot E2E ST performance.

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Overview of the 2024 Shared Task on Chemotherapy Treatment Timeline Extraction

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