Related papers: Hurtful Words: Quantifying Biases in Clinical Cont…

Language carries implicit human biases, functioning both as a reflection and a perpetuation of stereotypes that people carry with them. Recently, ML-based NLP methods such as word embeddings have been shown to learn such language biases…

Contextualized word embeddings, i.e. vector representations for words in context, are naturally seen as an extension of previous noncontextual distributional semantic models. In this work, we focus on BERT, a deep neural network that…

Word embeddings represent a transformative technology for analyzing text data in social work research, offering sophisticated tools for understanding case notes, policy documents, research literature, and other text-based materials. This…

Natural language processing techniques are being applied to increasingly diverse types of electronic health records, and can benefit from in-depth understanding of the distinguishing characteristics of medical document types. We present a…

Subjective bias detection is critical for applications like propaganda detection, content recommendation, sentiment analysis, and bias neutralization. This bias is introduced in natural language via inflammatory words and phrases, casting…

Pretrained language models are publicly available and constantly finetuned for various real-life applications. As they become capable of grasping complex contextual information, harmful biases are likely increasingly intertwined with those…

Contextual word embedding models such as ELMo (Peters et al., 2018) and BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) have dramatically improved performance for many natural language processing (NLP) tasks in recent months. However, these models have been…

Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task of Biomedical Natural Language Processing for extracting relevant information from biomedical texts, such as clinical records, scientific publications, and electronic health…

Clinical notes are becoming an increasingly important data source for machine learning (ML) applications in healthcare. Prior research has shown that deploying ML models can perpetuate existing biases against racial minorities, as bias can…

Sense embedding learning methods learn different embeddings for the different senses of an ambiguous word. One sense of an ambiguous word might be socially biased while its other senses remain unbiased. In comparison to the numerous prior…

Automating the recognition of outcomes reported in clinical trials using machine learning has a huge potential of speeding up access to evidence necessary in healthcare decision-making. Prior research has however acknowledged inadequate…

Societal biases in the usage of words, including harmful stereotypes, are frequently learned by common word embedding methods. These biases manifest not only between a word and an explicit marker of its stereotype, but also between words…

The success of pretrained word embeddings has motivated their use in the biomedical domain, with contextualized embeddings yielding remarkable results in several biomedical NLP tasks. However, there is a lack of research on quantifying…

Machine learning algorithms are optimized to model statistical properties of the training data. If the input data reflects stereotypes and biases of the broader society, then the output of the learning algorithm also captures these…

Predicting patient mortality is an important and challenging problem in the healthcare domain, especially for intensive care unit (ICU) patients. Electronic health notes serve as a rich source for learning patient representations, that can…

Current advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have made it increasingly feasible to build applications leveraging textual data. Generally, the core of these applications rely on having a good semantic representation of text into…

Gender bias is highly impacting natural language processing applications. Word embeddings have clearly been proven both to keep and amplify gender biases that are present in current data sources. Recently, contextualized word embeddings…

A common paradigm for identifying semantic differences across social and temporal contexts is the use of static word embeddings and their distances. In particular, past work has compared embeddings against "semantic axes" that represent two…

Noisy training data can significantly degrade the performance of language-model-based classifiers, particularly in non-topical classification tasks. In this study we designed a methodological framework to assess the impact of denoising.…

Pre-trained contextualized embedding models such as BERT are a standard building block in many natural language processing systems. We demonstrate that the sentence-level representations produced by some off-the-shelf contextualized…