arXiv Machine Learning

Clinical Domain Classification from Medical Transcriptions

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Distilled Rapid Embedding Transfer (DRET): Parameter-Efficient Biomedical Domain Adaptation via Priority-Based Embedding Transfer

The paper introduces Distilled Rapid Embedding Transfer (DRET), a parameter‑efficient method that injects biomedical domain knowledge from large specialized models into a smaller general‑purpose model without retraining on the original specialized corpora. DRET evolves through iterative strategies—tokenizer‑merge (DRET 1.x), hybrid embedding averaging (DRET 2.0), priority‑based embedding transfer (DRET 3.x), and further refinements (DRET 4.x)—and demonstrates that a 66‑million‑parameter DistilBERT can achieve competitive or superior performance on token‑level PICO classification compared to much larger models, while remaining lightweight. The authors validate the embedding‑level transfer with cosine similarity, semantic‑shift, and t‑SNE analyses, highlighting DRET’s potential for scalable, resource‑efficient biomedical text mining.

By Girish Sundaram, Daniel Berleant
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Language Specificity vs. Domain Diversity: Benchmarking Transformers for Bangla Medical NER

This study benchmarks transformer models for Bangla medical named entity recognition (NER), comparing BanglaBERT, multilingual BERT (mBERT), XLM‑RoBERTa, and GPT‑4o mini under zero‑shot and few‑shot prompting. Across a full test set of 3,179 samples, fine‑tuned XLM‑RoBERTa achieves a new state‑of‑the‑art F1‑score of 0.5959, while BanglaBERT lags with 0.4937, suggesting that domain diversity outweighs language specificity. The analysis shows high performance on Medicine and Specialist entities (F1 > 0.83) but lower accuracy on Symptoms (F1 0.4367), and demonstrates that fine‑tuned transformers outperform prompt‑only approaches by a factor of 3.76.

By Rakib Abdullah, Md. Maruful Islam Maruf
arXiv AI
Sep 1

CoLa-ICD: A Knowledge-Enhanced Framework for Long-Tail Automated Medical Coding

CoLa-ICD is a knowledge‑enhanced framework designed to improve automatic medical coding of ICD codes in long, imbalanced clinical documents. It enriches ICD labels with external terms, models dependencies among related codes, and strengthens the alignment between label semantics and clinical evidence, particularly for rare codes. Experiments demonstrate that CoLa-ICD achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance in AUC, F1, and P@k, with larger gains in larger and sparser label spaces.

By Yihang Cheng, Veronica Liesaputra, Andrew Trotman
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

Custom Named Entity Recognition and Topic Classification for Global Health Publications

This thesis explores how to select and adapt NLP models for global health literature when annotated data and computational resources are scarce. It compares skip‑gram word2vec models trained on increasingly large specialized corpora with BioWordVec for semantic tag discovery, finding that larger coverage does not always yield more useful domain associations. The study also evaluates convolutional spaCy models versus a RoBERTa transformer for named entity recognition, noting a trade‑off between higher F1 scores and longer inference time, and investigates MiniLM few‑shot versus BART‑MNLI zero‑shot classification for multi‑label topic classification, highlighting practical constraints of inference cost. "whyItMatters":"The work provides empirical guidance on balancing model accuracy and resource demands for building knowledge systems in low‑resource global health settings."

By Genis Skura, Antoine Geissb\"uhler, Jean-Luc Falcone
arXiv AI
Jul 21

Data Balancing Strategies: A Systematic Survey of Resampling and Augmentation Methods

arXiv:2505. 13518v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Imbalanced datasets, where one class significantly outnumbers others, remain a persistent challenge in machine learning, often biasing predictions toward the majority class and degrading classifier performance.

By Behnam Yousefimehr, Mehdi Ghatee, Javad Fazli, Shervin Ghaffari, Zahra Rafei, Mohammad Amin Seifi, Sajed Tavakoli, Abolfazl Nikahd, Mahdi Razi Gandomani, Alireza Orouji, Ramtin Mahmoudi Kashani, Sarina Heshmati, Negin Sadat Mousavi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 20

LLM4EHR: Aligning Clinical Time Series with Medical Event Sequences via Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 15447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent research in clinical machine learning, focusing on outcome predictions in intensive care unit (ICU), has shifted from bespoke supervised models to foundation models, utilising modern representation learning methods.

By Jingteng Li, Alexander Capstick, Louise Rigny, Iona Biggart, Neil J Sebire, Payam Barnaghi
arXiv AI
Oct 23

EHRAdapt: Adapting Pretrained Language Models to Electronic Health Records with Semantic Priors for Rare Clinical Events

EHRAdapt is an adapter that maps electronic health record tuples directly into a frozen language model’s embedding space, using learned embeddings for modality, time gaps, and dedicated vectors for event codes. It represents each event vector as a sum of a frozen, ontology‑trained semantic prior and a low‑rank evidence residual, enabling robust learning even for rare clinical events. Experiments on four million patient records with three large language model backbones show that the full adapter outperforms all ablations in next‑event prediction and improves rare‑disease discrimination in classification tasks.

By Andre R Goncalves, Vincent Liu, Priyadip Ray