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The use of superior algorithms and complex architectures in language models have successfully imparted human-like abilities to machines for specific tasks. But two significant constraints, the available training data size and the understanding of domain-specific context, hamper the pre-trained language models from optimal and reliable performance. A potential solution to tackle these limitations is to equip the language models with domain knowledge. While the commonly adopted techniques use Knowledge Graphs Embeddings (KGEs) to inject domain knowledge, we provide a Knowledge Language Model (K-LM) to use the Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples directly, extracted from world knowledge bases. The proposed model works in conjunction with Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT-2) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and uses a well-defined pipeline to select, categorize, and filter the RDF triples. In addition, we introduce heuristic methods to inject domain-specific knowledge in K-LM, leveraging knowledge graphs (KGs). We tested our approaches on the classification task within the scholarly domain using two KGs, and our results show that our proposed language model has significantly outperformed the baselines and BERT for each KG. Our experimental findings also help us conclude the importance of relevance of KG used over the quantity of injected RDF triples. Also, each of our proposed methods for injecting the RDF triples has increased the overall model’s accuracy, demonstrating that K-LM is a potential choice for domain adaptation to solve knowledge-driven problems.

The past decade has seen an explosion of the amount of digital information generated within the healthcare domain. Digital data exist in the form of images, video, speech, transcripts, electronic health records, clinical records, and free-text. Analysis and interpretation of healthcare data is a daunting task, and it demands a great deal of time, resources, and human effort. In this paper, we focus on the problem of co-morbidity recognition from patient's clinical records. To this aim, we employ both classical machine learning and deep learning approaches. We use word embeddings and bag-of-words representations, coupled with feature selection techniques. The goal of our work is to develop a classification system to identify whether a certain health condition occurs for a patient by studying his/her past clinical records. In more detail, we have used pre-trained word2vec, domain-trained, GloVe, fastText, and universal sentence encoder embeddings to tackle the classification of sixteen morbidity conditions within clinical records. We have compared the outcomes of classical machine learning and deep learning approaches with the employed feature representation methods and feature selection methods. We present a comprehensive discussion of the performances and behaviour of the employed classical machine learning and deep learning approaches. Finally, we have also used ensemble learning techniques over a large number of combinations of classifiers to improve the single model performance. For our experiments, we used the n2c2 natural language processing research dataset, released by Harvard Medical School. The dataset is in the form of clinical notes that contain patient discharge summaries. Given the unbalancedness of the data and their small size, the experimental results indicate the advantage of the ensemble learning technique with respect to single classifier models. In particular, the ensemble learning technique has slightly improved the performances of single classification models but has greatly reduced the variance of predictions stabilizing the accuracies (i.e., the lower standard deviation in comparison with single classifiers). In real-life scenarios, our work can be employed to identify with high accuracy morbidity conditions of patients by feeding our tool with their current clinical notes. Moreover, other domains where classification is a common problem might benefit from our approach as well.

Research on the analysis of counselling conversations through natural language processing methods has seen remarkable growth in recent years. However, the potential of this field is still greatly limited by the lack of access to publicly available therapy dialogues, especially those with expert annotations, but it has been alleviated thanks to the recent release of AnnoMI, the first publicly and freely available conversation dataset of 133 faithfully transcribed and expert-annotated demonstrations of high- and low-quality motivational interviewing (MI)—an effective therapy strategy that evokes client motivation for positive change. In this work, we introduce new expert-annotated utterance attributes to AnnoMI and describe the entire data collection process in more detail, including dialogue source selection, transcription, annotation, and post-processing. Based on the expert annotations on key MI aspects, we carry out thorough analyses of AnnoMI with respect to counselling-related properties on the utterance, conversation, and corpus levels. Furthermore, we introduce utterance-level prediction tasks with potential real-world impacts and build baseline models. Finally, we examine the performance of the models on dialogues of different topics and probe the generalisability of the models to unseen topics.