Haochun Wang


2022

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Prompt Combines Paraphrase: Teaching Pre-trained Models to Understand Rare Biomedical Words
Haochun Wang | Chi Liu | Nuwa Xi | Sendong Zhao | Meizhi Ju | Shiwei Zhang | Ziheng Zhang | Yefeng Zheng | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Prompt-based fine-tuning for pre-trained models has proven effective for many natural language processing tasks under few-shot settings in general domain. However, tuning with prompt in biomedical domain has not been investigated thoroughly. Biomedical words are often rare in general domain, but quite ubiquitous in biomedical contexts, which dramatically deteriorates the performance of pre-trained models on downstream biomedical applications even after fine-tuning, especially in low-resource scenarios. We propose a simple yet effective approach to helping models learn rare biomedical words during tuning with prompt. Experimental results show that our method can achieve up to 6% improvement in biomedical natural language inference task without any extra parameters or training steps using few-shot vanilla prompt settings.