Healthcare professionals rely on evidence from clinical trial records (CTRs) to devise treatment plans. However, the increasing quantity of CTRs poses challenges in efficiently assimilating the latest evidence to provide personalized evidence-based care. In this paper, we present our solution to the SemEval- 2024 Task 2 titled “Safe Biomedical Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trials”. Given a statement and one/two CTRs as inputs, the task is to determine whether or not the statement entails or contradicts the CTRs. We explore both generative and discriminative large language models (LLM) to investigate their performance for clinical inference. Moreover, we contrast the general-purpose LLMs with the ones specifically tailored for the clinical domain to study the potential advantage in mitigating distributional shifts. Furthermore, the benefit of augmenting additional knowledge within the prompt/statement is examined in this work. Our empirical study suggests that DeBERTa-lg, a discriminative general-purpose natural language inference model, obtains the highest F1 score of 0.77 on the test set, securing the fourth rank on the leaderboard. Intriguingly, the augmentation of knowledge yields subpar results across most cases.

This paper presents our solution, garNER, to the SemEval-2023 MultiConer task. We propose a knowledge augmentation approach by directly querying entities from the Wikipedia API and appending the summaries of the entities to the input sentence. These entities are either retrieved from the labeled training set (Gold Entity) or from off-the-shelf entity taggers (Entity Extractor). Ensemble methods are then applied across multiple models to get the final prediction. Our analysis shows that the added contexts are beneficial only when such contexts are relevant to the target-named entities, but detrimental when the contexts are irrelevant.

For the 2023 IWSLT Maltese Speech Translation Task, UM-DFKI jointly presents a cascade solution which achieves 0.6 BLEU. While this is the first time that a Maltese speech translation task has been released by IWSLT, this paper explores previous solutions for other speech translation tasks, focusing primarily on low-resource scenarios. Moreover, we present our method of fine-tuning XLS-R models for Maltese ASR using a collection of multi-lingual speech corpora as well as the fine-tuning of the mBART model for Maltese to English machine translation.