Rewire-then-Probe: A Contrastive Recipe for Probing Biomedical Knowledge of Pre-trained Language Models
Zaiqiao Meng, Fangyu Liu, Ehsan Shareghi, Yixuan Su, Charlotte Collins, Nigel Collier
Abstract
Knowledge probing is crucial for understanding the knowledge transfer mechanism behind the pre-trained language models (PLMs). Despite the growing progress of probing knowledge for PLMs in the general domain, specialised areas such as the biomedical domain are vastly under-explored. To facilitate this, we release a well-curated biomedical knowledge probing benchmark, MedLAMA, constructed based on the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus. We test a wide spectrum of state-of-the-art PLMs and probing approaches on our benchmark, reaching at most 3% of acc@10. While highlighting various sources of domain-specific challenges that amount to this underwhelming performance, we illustrate that the underlying PLMs have a higher potential for probing tasks. To achieve this, we propose Contrastive-Probe, a novel self-supervised contrastive probing approach, that adjusts the underlying PLMs without using any probing data. While Contrastive-Probe pushes the acc@10 to 28%, the performance gap still remains notable. Our human expert evaluation suggests that the probing performance of our Contrastive-Probe is still under-estimated as UMLS still does not include the full spectrum of factual knowledge. We hope MedLAMA and Contrastive-Probe facilitate further developments of more suited probing techniques for this domain. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/cambridgeltl/medlama.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.acl-long.329
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Dublin, Ireland
- Editors:
- Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4798–4810
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.329
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.329
- Cite (ACL):
- Zaiqiao Meng, Fangyu Liu, Ehsan Shareghi, Yixuan Su, Charlotte Collins, and Nigel Collier. 2022. Rewire-then-Probe: A Contrastive Recipe for Probing Biomedical Knowledge of Pre-trained Language Models. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4798–4810, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Rewire-then-Probe: A Contrastive Recipe for Probing Biomedical Knowledge of Pre-trained Language Models (Meng et al., ACL 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/2022.acl-long.329.pdf
- Code
- cambridgeltl/medlama
- Data
- BLUE, BioLAMA, LAMA