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The recent rapid development in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has greatly en- hanced the effectiveness of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) as tools for healthcare education. These systems hold the potential to improve health-related quality of life (HRQoL) outcomes, especially for populations with limited English reading and writing skills. However, despite the progress in pre-trained multilingual NLP models, there exists a noticeable research gap when it comes to code-switching within the medical context. Code-switching is a prevalent phenomenon in multilingual communities where individuals seamlessly transition between languages during conversations. This presents a distinctive challenge for healthcare ITS aimed at serving multilin- gual communities, as it demands a thorough understanding of and accurate adaptation to code- switching, which has thus far received limited attention in research. The hypothesis of our work asserts that the development of an ITS for healthcare education, culturally appropriate to the Hispanic population with frequent code-switching practices, is both achievable and pragmatic. Given that text classification is a core problem to many tasks in ITS, like sentiment analysis, topic classification, and smart replies, we target text classification as the application domain to validate our hypothesis. Our model relies on pre-trained word embeddings to offer rich representations for understand- ing code-switching medical contexts. However, training such word embeddings, especially within the medical domain, poses a significant challenge due to limited training corpora. In our approach to address this challenge, we identify distinct English and Spanish embeddings, each trained on medical corpora, and subsequently merge them into a unified vector space via space transforma- tion. In our study, we demonstrate that singular value decomposition (SVD) can be used to learn a linear transformation (a matrix), which aligns monolingual vectors from two languages in a single meta-embedding. As an example, we assessed the similarity between the words “cat” and “gato” both before and after alignment, utilizing the cosine similarity metric. Prior to alignment, these words exhibited a similarity score of 0.52, whereas after alignment, the similarity score increased to 0.64. This example illustrates that aligning the word vectors in a meta-embedding enhances the similarity between these words, which share the same meaning in their respective languages. To assess the quality of the representations in our meta-embedding in the context of code-switching, we employed a neural network to conduct text classification tasks on code-switching datasets. Our results demonstrate that, compared to pre-trained multilingual models, our model can achieve high performance in text classification tasks while utilizing significantly fewer parameters.
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Neural semi-Markov CRF for Monolingual Word Alignment
Monolingual word alignment is important for studying fine-grained editing operations (i.e., deletion, addition, and substitution) in text-to-text generation tasks, such as paraphrase generation, text simplification, neutralizing biased language, etc. In this paper, we present a novel neural semi-Markov CRF alignment model, which unifies word and phrase alignments through variable-length spans. We also create a new benchmark with human annotations that cover four different text genres to evaluate monolingual word alignment models in more realistic settings. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms all previous approaches for monolingual word alignment as well as a competitive QA-based baseline, which was previously only applied to bilingual data. Our model demonstrates good generalizability to three out-of-domain datasets and shows great utility in two downstream applications: automatic text simplification and sentence pair classification tasks.
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- PAR ID:
- 10281832
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
- Volume:
- Volume 1: Long Papers
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 6815 to 6828
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.531
