Inferring Which Medical Treatments Work from Reports of Clinical Trials

Eric Lehman, Jay DeYoung, Regina Barzilay, Byron C. Wallace


Abstract
How do we know if a particular medical treatment actually works? Ideally one would consult all available evidence from relevant clinical trials. Unfortunately, such results are primarily disseminated in natural language scientific articles, imposing substantial burden on those trying to make sense of them. In this paper, we present a new task and corpus for making this unstructured published scientific evidence actionable. The task entails inferring reported findings from a full-text article describing randomized controlled trials (RCT) with respect to a given intervention, comparator, and outcome of interest, e.g., inferring if a given article provides evidence supporting the use of aspirin to reduce risk of stroke, as compared to placebo. We present a new corpus for this task comprising 10,000+ prompts coupled with full-text articles describing RCTs. Results using a suite of baseline models — ranging from heuristic (rule-based) approaches to attentive neural architectures — demonstrate the difficulty of the task, which we believe largely owes to the lengthy, technical input texts. To facilitate further work on this important, challenging problem we make the corpus, documentation, a website and leaderboard, and all source code for baselines and evaluation publicly available.
Anthology ID:
N19-1371
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3705–3717
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1371
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1371
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eric Lehman, Jay DeYoung, Regina Barzilay, and Byron C. Wallace. 2019. Inferring Which Medical Treatments Work from Reports of Clinical Trials. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 3705–3717, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Inferring Which Medical Treatments Work from Reports of Clinical Trials (Lehman et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1371.pdf
Software:
 N19-1371.Software.tar
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/359705097
Code
 jayded/evidence-inference +  additional community code
Data
Evidence Inference