Paloma Rabaey
2026
Modeling Clinical Uncertainty in Radiology Reports: From Explicit Uncertainty Markers to Implicit Reasoning Pathways
Paloma Rabaey | Jong Hak Moon | Jung-Oh Lee | Min Gwan Kim | Hangyul Yoon | Thomas Demeester | Edward Choi
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Paloma Rabaey | Jong Hak Moon | Jung-Oh Lee | Min Gwan Kim | Hangyul Yoon | Thomas Demeester | Edward Choi
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Radiology reports are invaluable for clinical decision-making and hold great potential for automated analysis when structured into machine-readable formats. These reports often contain uncertainty, which we categorize into two distinct types: (i) Explicit uncertainty reflects doubt about the presence or absence of findings, conveyed through hedging phrases. These vary in meaning depending on the context, making rule-based systems insufficient to quantify the level of uncertainty for specific findings; (ii) Implicit uncertainty arises when radiologists omit parts of their reasoning, recording only key findings or diagnoses. Here, it is often unclear whether omitted findings are truly absent or simply unmentioned for brevity. We address these challenges with a two-part framework. We quantify explicit uncertainty by creating an expert-validated, LLM-based reference ranking of common hedging phrases, and mapping each finding to a probability value based on this reference. In addition, we model implicit uncertainty through an expansion framework that systematically adds characteristic sub-findings derived from expert-defined diagnostic pathways for 14 common diagnoses. Using these methods, we release Lunguage++, an expanded, uncertainty-aware version of the Lunguage benchmark of fine-grained structured radiology reports. This enriched resource enables uncertainty-aware image classification, faithful diagnostic reasoning, and new investigations into the clinical impact of diagnostic uncertainty.
2021
Frozen Pretrained Transformers for Neural Sign Language Translation
Mathieu De Coster | Karel D’Oosterlinck | Marija Pizurica | Paloma Rabaey | Severine Verlinden | Mieke Van Herreweghe | Joni Dambre
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Automatic Translation for Signed and Spoken Languages (AT4SSL)
Mathieu De Coster | Karel D’Oosterlinck | Marija Pizurica | Paloma Rabaey | Severine Verlinden | Mieke Van Herreweghe | Joni Dambre
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Automatic Translation for Signed and Spoken Languages (AT4SSL)
One of the major challenges in sign language translation from a sign language to a spoken language is the lack of parallel corpora. Recent works have achieved promising results on the RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014T dataset, which consists of over eight thousand parallel sentences between German sign language and German. However, from the perspective of neural machine translation, this is still a tiny dataset. To improve the performance of models trained on small datasets, transfer learning can be used. While this has been previously applied in sign language translation for feature extraction, to the best of our knowledge, pretrained language models have not yet been investigated. We use pretrained BERT-base and mBART-50 models to initialize our sign language video to spoken language text translation model. To mitigate overfitting, we apply the frozen pretrained transformer technique: we freeze the majority of parameters during training. Using a pretrained BERT model, we outperform a baseline trained from scratch by 1 to 2 BLEU-4. Our results show that pretrained language models can be used to improve sign language translation performance and that the self-attention patterns in BERT transfer in zero-shot to the encoder and decoder of sign language translation models.