David Clifton


2023

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Disfluent Cues for Enhanced Speech Understanding in Large Language Models
Morteza Rohanian | Farhad Nooralahzadeh | Omid Rohanian | David Clifton | Michael Krauthammer
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

In computational linguistics, the common practice is to “clean” disfluent content from spontaneous speech. However, we hypothesize that these disfluencies might serve as more than mere noise, potentially acting as informative cues. We use a range of pre-trained models for a reading comprehension task involving disfluent queries, specifically featuring different types of speech repairs. The findings indicate that certain disfluencies can indeed improve model performance, particularly those stemming from context-based adjustments. However, large-scale language models struggle to handle repairs involving decision-making or the correction of lexical or syntactic errors, suggesting a crucial area for potential improvement. This paper thus highlights the importance of a nuanced approach to disfluencies, advocating for their potential utility in enhancing model performance rather than their removal.

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Using Bottleneck Adapters to Identify Cancer in Clinical Notes under Low-Resource Constraints
Omid Rohanian | Hannah Jauncey | Mohammadmahdi Nouriborji | Vinod Kumar | Bronner P. Gonalves | Christiana Kartsonaki | Isaric Clinical Characterisation Group | Laura Merson | David Clifton
The 22nd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing and BioNLP Shared Tasks

Processing information locked within clinical health records is a challenging task that remains an active area of research in biomedical NLP. In this work, we evaluate a broad set of machine learning techniques ranging from simple RNNs to specialised transformers such as BioBERT on a dataset containing clinical notes along with a set of annotations indicating whether a sample is cancer-related or not. Furthermore, we specifically employ efficient fine-tuning methods from NLP, namely, bottleneck adapters and prompt tuning, to adapt the models to our specialised task. Our evaluations suggest that fine-tuning a frozen BERT model pre-trained on natural language and with bottleneck adapters outperforms all other strategies, including full fine-tuning of the specialised BioBERT model. Based on our findings, we suggest that using bottleneck adapters in low-resource situations with limited access to labelled data or processing capacity could be a viable strategy in biomedical text mining.

2022

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Nowruz at SemEval-2022 Task 7: Tackling Cloze Tests with Transformers and Ordinal Regression
Mohammadmahdi Nouriborji | Omid Rohanian | David Clifton
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

This paper outlines the system using which team Nowruz participated in SemEval 2022 Task 7 “Identifying Plausible Clarifications of Implicit and Underspecified Phrases” for both subtasks A and B. Using a pre-trained transformer as a backbone, the model targeted the task of multi-task classification and ranking in the context of finding the best fillers for a cloze task related to instructional texts on the website Wikihow. The system employed a combination of two ordinal regression components to tackle this task in a multi-task learning scenario. According to the official leaderboard of the shared task, this system was ranked 5th in the ranking and 7th in the classification subtasks out of 21 participating teams. With additional experiments, the models have since been further optimised. The code used in the experiments is going to be publicly available.