In-BoXBART: Get Instructions into Biomedical Multi-Task Learning
Mihir Parmar, Swaroop Mishra, Mirali Purohit, Man Luo, Murad Mohammad, Chitta Baral
Abstract
Single-task models have proven pivotal in solving specific tasks; however, they have limitations in real-world applications where multi-tasking is necessary and domain shifts are exhibited. Recently, instructional prompts have shown significant improvement towards multi-task generalization; however, the effect of instructional prompts and Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has not been systematically studied in the biomedical domain. Motivated by this, this paper explores the impact of instructional prompts for biomedical MTL. We introduce the BoX, a collection of 32 instruction tasks for Biomedical NLP across (X) various categories. Using this meta-dataset, we propose a unified model termed as In-BoXBART, that can jointly learn all tasks of the BoX without any task-specific modules. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to propose a unified model in the biomedical domain and use instructions to achieve generalization across several biomedical tasks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model: 1) outperforms single-task baseline by ~3% and multi-task (without instruction) baseline by ~18% on an average, and 2) shows ~23% improvement compared to single-task baseline in few-shot learning (i.e., 32 instances per task) on an average. Our analysis indicates that there is significant room for improvement across tasks in the BoX, implying the scope for future research direction.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.findings-naacl.10
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Seattle, United States
- Editors:
- Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 112–128
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.10
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.findings-naacl.10
- Cite (ACL):
- Mihir Parmar, Swaroop Mishra, Mirali Purohit, Man Luo, Murad Mohammad, and Chitta Baral. 2022. In-BoXBART: Get Instructions into Biomedical Multi-Task Learning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022, pages 112–128, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- In-BoXBART: Get Instructions into Biomedical Multi-Task Learning (Parmar et al., Findings 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2022.findings-naacl.10.pdf
- Code
- mihir3009/in-boxbart + additional community code
- Data
- HOC, Natural Instructions, PubMedQA