Hooman Sedghamiz


2023

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Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM)
Sebastian Gehrmann | Alex Wang | João Sedoc | Elizabeth Clark | Kaustubh Dhole | Khyathi Raghavi Chandu | Enrico Santus | Hooman Sedghamiz
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM)

2022

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Generalizing over Long Tail Concepts for Medical Term Normalization
Beatrice Portelli | Simone Scaboro | Enrico Santus | Hooman Sedghamiz | Emmanuele Chersoni | Giuseppe Serra
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Medical term normalization consists in mapping a piece of text to a large number of output classes.Given the small size of the annotated datasets and the extremely long tail distribution of the concepts, it is of utmost importance to develop models that are capable to generalize to scarce or unseen concepts.An important attribute of most target ontologies is their hierarchical structure. In this paper we introduce a simple and effective learning strategy that leverages such information to enhance the generalizability of both discriminative and generative models.The evaluation shows that the proposed strategy produces state-of-the-art performance on seen concepts and consistent improvements on unseen ones, allowing also for efficient zero-shot knowledge transfer across text typologies and datasets.

2021

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SupCL-Seq: Supervised Contrastive Learning for Downstream Optimized Sequence Representations
Hooman Sedghamiz | Shivam Raval | Enrico Santus | Tuka Alhanai | Mohammad Ghassemi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

While contrastive learning is proven to be an effective training strategy in computer vision, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is only recently adopting it as a self-supervised alternative to Masked Language Modeling (MLM) for improving sequence representations. This paper introduces SupCL-Seq, which extends the supervised contrastive learning from computer vision to the optimization of sequence representations in NLP. By altering the dropout mask probability in standard Transformer architectures (e.g. BERT-base), for every representation (anchor), we generate augmented altered views. A supervised contrastive loss is then utilized to maximize the system’s capability of pulling together similar samples (e.g., anchors and their altered views) and pushing apart the samples belonging to the other classes. Despite its simplicity, SupCL-Seq leads to large gains in many sequence classification tasks on the GLUE benchmark compared to a standard BERT-base, including 6% absolute improvement on CoLA, 5.4% on MRPC, 4.7% on RTE and 2.6% on STS-B. We also show consistent gains over self-supervised contrastively learned representations, especially in non-semantic tasks. Finally we show that these gains are not solely due to augmentation, but rather to a downstream optimized sequence representation.

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Exploring a Unified Sequence-To-Sequence Transformer for Medical Product Safety Monitoring in Social Media
Shivam Raval | Hooman Sedghamiz | Enrico Santus | Tuka Alhanai | Mohammad Ghassemi | Emmanuele Chersoni
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Adverse Events (AE) are harmful events resulting from the use of medical products. Although social media may be crucial for early AE detection, the sheer scale of this data makes it logistically intractable to analyze using human agents, with NLP representing the only low-cost and scalable alternative. In this paper, we frame AE Detection and Extraction as a sequence-to-sequence problem using the T5 model architecture and achieve strong performance improvements over the baselines on several English benchmarks (F1 = 0.71, 12.7% relative improvement for AE Detection; Strict F1 = 0.713, 12.4% relative improvement for AE Extraction). Motivated by the strong commonalities between AE tasks, the class imbalance in AE benchmarks, and the linguistic and structural variety typical of social media texts, we propose a new strategy for multi-task training that accounts, at the same time, for task and dataset characteristics. Our approach increases model robustness, leading to further performance gains. Finally, our framework shows some language transfer capabilities, obtaining higher performance than Multilingual BERT in zero-shot learning on French data.