Safe and reliable natural language inference is critical for extracting insights from clinical trial reports but poses challenges due to biases in large pre-trained language models. This paper presents a novel data augmentation technique to improve model robustness for biomedical natural language inference in clinical trials. By generating synthetic examples through semantic perturbations and domain-specific vocabulary replacement and adding a new task for numerical and quantitative reasoning, we introduce greater diversity and reduce shortcut learning. Our approach, combined with multi-task learning and the DeBERTa architecture, achieved significant performance gains on the NLI4CT 2024 benchmark compared to the original language models. Ablation studies validate the contribution of each augmentation method in improving robustness. Our best-performing model ranked 12th in terms of faithfulness and 8th in terms of consistency, respectively, out of the 32 participants.

We introduce YATO, an open-source, easy-to-use toolkit for text analysis with deep learning. Different from existing heavily engineered toolkits and platforms, YATO is lightweight and user-friendly for researchers from cross-disciplinary areas. Designed in a hierarchical structure, YATO supports free combinations of three types of widely used features including 1) traditional neural networks (CNN, RNN, etc.); 2) pre-trained language models (BERT, RoBERTa, ELECTRA, etc.); and 3) user-customized neural features via a simple configurable file. Benefiting from the advantages of flexibility and ease of use, YATO can facilitate fast reproduction and refinement of state-of-the-art NLP models, and promote the cross-disciplinary applications of NLP techniques. The code, examples, and documentation are publicly available at https://github.com/jiesutd/YATO. A demo video is also available at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ0mhzMcRuDUlTkzBfAftOqiJRxYTTjXH.