Yuantao Xie


2021

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Named Entity Recognition via Noise Aware Training Mechanism with Data Filter
Xiusheng Huang | Yubo Chen | Shun Wu | Jun Zhao | Yuantao Xie | Weijian Sun
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2020

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FedED: Federated Learning via Ensemble Distillation for Medical Relation Extraction
Dianbo Sui | Yubo Chen | Jun Zhao | Yantao Jia | Yuantao Xie | Weijian Sun
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Unlike other domains, medical texts are inevitably accompanied by private information, so sharing or copying these texts is strictly restricted. However, training a medical relation extraction model requires collecting these privacy-sensitive texts and storing them on one machine, which comes in conflict with privacy protection. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving medical relation extraction model based on federated learning, which enables training a central model with no single piece of private local data being shared or exchanged. Though federated learning has distinct advantages in privacy protection, it suffers from the communication bottleneck, which is mainly caused by the need to upload cumbersome local parameters. To overcome this bottleneck, we leverage a strategy based on knowledge distillation. Such a strategy uses the uploaded predictions of ensemble local models to train the central model without requiring uploading local parameters. Experiments on three publicly available medical relation extraction datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.