Biomedical queries have become increasingly prevalent in web searches, reflecting the growing interest in accessing biomedical literature. Despite recent research on large-language models (LLMs) motivated by endeavors to attain generalized intelligence, their efficacy in replacing task and domain-specific natural language understanding approaches remains questionable. In this paper, we address this question by conducting a comprehensive empirical evaluation of intent detection and named entity recognition (NER) tasks from biomedical text. We show that Supervised Fine Tuned approaches are still relevant and more effective than general-purpose LLMs. Biomedical transformer models such as PubMedBERT can surpass ChatGPT on NER task with only 5 supervised examples.

In an ever-expanding world of domain-specific knowledge, the increasing complexity of consuming, and storing information necessitates the generation of summaries from large information repositories. However, every persona of a domain has different requirements of information and hence their summarization. For example, in the healthcare domain, a persona-based (such as Doctor, Nurse, Patient etc.) approach is imperative to deliver targeted medical information efficiently. Persona-based summarization of domain-specific information by humans is a high cognitive load task and is generally not preferred. The summaries generated by two different humans have high variability and do not scale in cost and subject matter expertise as domains and personas grow. Further, AI-generated summaries using generic Large Language Models (LLMs) may not necessarily offer satisfactory accuracy for different domains unless they have been specifically trained on domain-specific data and can also be very expensive to use in day-to-day operations. Our contribution in this paper is two-fold: 1) We present an approach to efficiently fine-tune a domain-specific small foundation LLM using a healthcare corpus and also show that we can effectively evaluate the summarization quality using AI-based critiquing. 2) We further show that AI-based critiquing has good concordance with Human-based critiquing of the summaries. Hence, such AI-based pipelines to generate domain-specific persona-based summaries can be easily scaled to other domains such as legal, enterprise documents, education etc. in a very efficient and cost-effective manner.

Scarcity of data and technological limitations for resource-poor languages in developing countries like India poses a threat to the development of sophisticated NLU systems for healthcare. To assess the current status of various state-of-the-art language models in healthcare, this paper studies the problem by initially proposing two different Healthcare datasets, Indian Healthcare Query Intent-WebMD and 1mg (IHQID-WebMD and IHQID-1mg) and one real world Indian hospital query data in English and multiple Indic languages (Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Gujarati) which are annotated with the query intents as well as entities. Our aim is to detect query intents and corresponding entities. We perform extensive experiments on a set of models which in various realistic settings and explore two scenarios based on the access to English data only (less costly) and access to target language data (more expensive). We analyze context specific practical relevancy through empirical analysis. The results, expressed in terms of overall F-score show that our approach is practically useful to identify intents and entities.

In the last few years, several attempts have been made on extracting information from material science research domain. Material Science research articles are a rich source of information about various entities related to material science such as names of the materials used for experiments, the computational software used along with its parameters, the method used in the experiments, etc. But the distribution of these entities is not uniform across different sections of research articles. Most of the sentences in the research articles do not contain any entity. In this work, we first use a sentence-level classifier to identify sentences containing at least one entity mention. Next, we apply the information extraction models only on the filtered sentences, to extract various entities of interest. Our experiments for named entity recognition in the material science research articles show that this additional sentence-level classification step helps to improve the F1 score by more than 4%.

A law practitioner has to go through numerous lengthy legal case proceedings for their practices of various categories, such as land dispute, corruption, etc. Hence, it is important to summarize these documents, and ensure that summaries contain phrases with intent matching the category of the case. To the best of our knowledge, there is no evaluation metric that evaluates a summary based on its intent. We propose an automated intent-based summarization metric, which shows a better agreement with human evaluation as compared to other automated metrics like BLEU, ROUGE-L etc. in terms of human satisfaction. We also curate a dataset by annotating intent phrases in legal documents, and show a proof of concept as to how this system can be automated.

Systems like Voice-command based conversational agents are characterized by a pre-defined set of skills or intents to perform user specified tasks. In the course of time, newer intents may emerge requiring retraining. However, the newer intents may not be explicitly announced and need to be inferred dynamically. Thus, there are two important tasks at hand (a). identifying emerging new intents, (b). annotating data of the new intents so that the underlying classifier can be retrained efficiently. The tasks become specially challenging when a large number of new intents emerge simultaneously and there is a limited budget of manual annotation. In this paper, we propose MNID (Multiple Novel Intent Detection) which is a cluster based framework to detect multiple novel intents with budgeted human annotation cost. Empirical results on various benchmark datasets (of different sizes) demonstrate that MNID, by intelligently using the budget for annotation, outperforms the baseline methods in terms of accuracy and F1-score.

This paper proposes a graphical framework to extract opinionated sentences which highlight different contexts within a given news article by introducing the concept of diversity in a graphical model for opinion detection. We conduct extensive evaluations and find that the proposed modification leads to impressive improvement in performance and makes the final results of the model much more usable. The proposed method (OP-D) not only performs much better than the other techniques used for opinion detection as well as introducing diversity, but is also able to select opinions from different categories (Asher et al. 2009). By developing a classification model which categorizes the identified sentences into various opinion categories, we find that OP-D is able to push opinions from different categories uniformly among the top opinions.