A Deep Metric Learning Method for Biomedical Passage Retrieval

Andrés Rosso-Mateus, Fabio A. González, Manuel Montes-y-Gómez


Abstract
Passage retrieval is the task of identifying text snippets that are valid answers for a natural language posed question. One way to address this problem is to look at it as a metric learning problem, where we want to induce a metric between questions and passages that assign smaller distances to more relevant passages. In this work, we present a novel method for passage retrieval that learns a metric for questions and passages based on their internal semantic interactions. The method uses a similar approach to that of triplet networks, where the training samples are composed of one anchor (the question) and two positive and negative samples (passages). However,and in contrast with triplet networks, the proposed method uses a novel deep architecture that better exploits the particularities of text and takes into consideration complementary relatedness measures. Besides, the paper presents a sampling strategy that selects both easy and hard negative samples which improves the accuracy of the trained model. The method is particularly well suited for domain-specific passage retrieval where it is very important to take into account different sources of information. The proposed approach was evaluated in a biomedical passage retrieval task, the BioASQ challenge, outperforming standard triplet loss substantially by 10%,and state-of-the-art performance by 26%.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.548
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6229–6239
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.548
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.548
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andrés Rosso-Mateus, Fabio A. González, and Manuel Montes-y-Gómez. 2020. A Deep Metric Learning Method for Biomedical Passage Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6229–6239, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Deep Metric Learning Method for Biomedical Passage Retrieval (Rosso-Mateus et al., COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.coling-main.548.pdf
Data
BioASQ