As structured texts become increasingly complex across diverse domains -- from technical reports to generative AI prompts -- the need for text segmentation into semantically meaningful components becomes critical. Such texts often contain elements beyond plain language, including tables, code snippets, and placeholders, which conventional sentence- or paragraph-level segmentation methods cannot handle effectively. To address this challenge, we propose BoundRL, a novel and efficient approach that jointly performs token-level text segmentation and label prediction for long structured texts. Instead of generating complete contents for each segment, it generates only a sequence of starting tokens and reconstructs the complete contents by locating these tokens within the original texts, thereby reducing inference costs by orders of magnitude and minimizing hallucination. To adapt the model for the output format, BoundRL~performs reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) with a specifically designed reward that jointly optimizes document reconstruction fidelity and semantic alignment. To mitigate entropy collapse, it further constructs intermediate candidates by systematically perturbing a fraction of generated sequences of segments to create stepping stones toward higher-quality solutions. To demonstrate BoundRL's effectiveness on particularly challenging structured texts, we focus evaluation on complex prompts used for LLM applications. Experiments show that BoundRL enables small language models (1.7B parameters) to outperform few-shot prompting of much larger models. Moreover, RLVR with our designed reward yields significant improvements over supervised fine-tuning, and incorporating intermediate candidates further improves both performance and generalization.

Electronic health records (EHR) even though a boon for healthcare practitioners, are growing convoluted and longer every day. Sifting around these lengthy EHRs is taxing and becomes a cumbersome part of physician-patient interaction. Several approaches have been proposed to help alleviate this prevalent issue either via summarization or sectioning, however, only a few approaches have truly been helpful in the past. With the rise of automated methods, machine learning (ML) has shown promise in solving the task of identifying relevant sections in EHR. However, most ML methods rely on labeled data which is difficult to get in healthcare. Large language models (LLMs) on the other hand, have performed impressive feats in natural language processing (NLP), that too in a zero-shot manner, i.e. without any labeled data. To that end, we propose using LLMs to identify relevant section headers. We find that GPT-4 can effectively solve the task on both zero and few-shot settings as well as segment dramatically better than state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we also annotate a much harder real world dataset and find that GPT-4 struggles to perform well, alluding to further research and harder benchmarks.

Finetuning Large Language Models helps improve the results for domain-specific use cases. End-to-end finetuning of large language models is time and resource intensive and has high storage requirements to store the finetuned version of the large language model. Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) methods address the time and resource challenges by keeping the large language model as a fixed base and add additional layers, which the PEFT methods finetune. This paper demonstrates the evaluation results for one such PEFT method Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA), for Clinical Dialogue Summarization. The evaluation results show that LoRA works at par with end-to-end finetuning for a large language model.

This paper describes PULSAR, our system submission at the ImageClef 2023 MediQA-Sum task on summarising patient-doctor dialogues into clinical records. The proposed framework relies on domain-specific pre-training, to produce a specialised language model which is trained on task-specific natural data augmented by synthetic data generated by a black-box LLM. We find limited evidence towards the efficacy of domain-specific pre-training and data augmentation, while scaling up the language model yields the best performance gains. Our approach was ranked second and third among 13 submissions on task B of the challenge. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuping-wu/PULSAR.

Medical dialogue summarization is challenging due to the unstructured nature of medical conversations, the use of medical terminology in gold summaries, and the need to identify key information across multiple symptom sets. We present a novel system for the Dialogue2Note Medical Summarization tasks in the MEDIQA 2023 Shared Task. Our approach for section-wise summarization (Task A) is a two-stage process of selecting semantically similar dialogues and using the top-k similar dialogues as in-context examples for GPT-4. For full-note summarization (Task B), we use a similar solution with k=1. We achieved 3rd place in Task A (2nd among all teams), 4th place in Task B Division Wise Summarization (2nd among all teams), 15th place in Task A Section Header Classification (9th among all teams), and 8th place among all teams in Task B. Our results highlight the effectiveness of few-shot prompting for this task, though we also identify several weaknesses of prompting-based approaches. We compare GPT-4 performance with several finetuned baselines. We find that GPT-4 summaries are more abstractive and shorter. We make our code publicly available.

This paper explores methods for extracting information from radiology reports that generalize across exam modalities to reduce requirements for annotated data. We demonstrate that multi-pass T5-based text-to-text generative models exhibit better generalization across exam modalities compared to approaches that employ BERT-based task-specific classification layers. We then develop methods that reduce the inference cost of the model, making large-scale corpus processing more feasible for clinical applications. Specifically, we introduce a generative technique that decomposes complex tasks into smaller subtask blocks, which improves a single-pass model when combined with multitask training. In addition, we leverage target-domain contexts during inference to enhance domain adaptation, enabling use of smaller models. Analyses offer insights into the benefits of different cost reduction strategies.

This paper describes our submission to the MEDIQA-Chat 2023 shared task for automatic clinical note generation from doctor-patient conversations. We report results for two approaches: the first fine-tunes a pre-trained language model (PLM) on the shared task data, and the second uses few-shot in-context learning (ICL) with a large language model (LLM). Both achieve high performance as measured by automatic metrics (e.g. ROUGE, BERTScore) and ranked second and first, respectively, of all submissions to the shared task. Expert human scrutiny indicates that notes generated via the ICL-based approach with GPT-4 are preferred about as often as human-written notes, making it a promising path toward automated note generation from doctor-patient conversations.

Zero-shot learning aims to recognize unseen objects using their semantic representations. Most existing works use visual attributes labeled by humans, not suitable for large-scale applications. In this paper, we revisit the use of documents as semantic representations. We argue that documents like Wikipedia pages contain rich visual information, which however can easily be buried by the vast amount of non-visual sentences. To address this issue, we propose a semi-automatic mechanism for visual sentence extraction that leverages the document section headers and the clustering structure of visual sentences. The extracted visual sentences, after a novel weighting scheme to distinguish similar classes, essentially form semantic representations like visual attributes but need much less human effort. On the ImageNet dataset with over 10,000 unseen classes, our representations lead to a 64% relative improvement against the commonly used ones.

Based on an exponentially increasing number of academic articles, discovering and citing comprehensive and appropriate resources has become a non-trivial task. Conventional citation recommender methods suffer from severe information loss. For example, they do not consider the section of the paper that the user is writing and for which they need to find a citation, the relatedness between the words in the local context (the text span that describes a citation), or the importance on each word from the local context. These shortcomings make such methods insufficient for recommending adequate citations to academic manuscripts. In this study, we propose a novel embedding-based neural network called "dual attention model for citation recommendation (DACR)" to recommend citations during manuscript preparation. Our method adapts embedding of three dimensions of semantic information: words in the local context, structural contexts, and the section on which a user is working. A neural network is designed to maximize the similarity between the embedding of the three input (local context words, section and structural contexts) and the target citation appearing in the context. The core of the neural network is composed of self-attention and additive attention, where the former aims to capture the relatedness between the contextual words and structural context, and the latter aims to learn the importance of them. The experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Understanding and extracting of information from large documents, such as business opportunities, academic articles, medical documents and technical reports, poses challenges not present in short documents. Such large documents may be multi-themed, complex, noisy and cover diverse topics. We describe a framework that can analyze large documents and help people and computer systems locate desired information in them. We aim to automatically identify and classify different sections of documents and understand their purpose within the document. A key contribution of our research is modeling and extracting the logical and semantic structure of electronic documents using deep learning techniques. We evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of our framework through extensive experiments on two collections: more than one million scholarly articles from arXiv and a collection of requests for proposal documents from government sources.