KBioXLM: A Knowledge-anchored Biomedical Multilingual Pretrained Language Model

Lei Geng, Xu Yan, Ziqiang Cao, Juntao Li, Wenjie Li, Sujian Li, Xinjie Zhou, Yang Yang, Jun Zhang

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

Abstract

Most biomedical pretrained language models are monolingual and cannot handle the growing cross-lingual requirements. The scarcity of non-English domain corpora, not to mention parallel data, poses a significant hurdle in training multilingual biomedical models. Since knowledge forms the core of domain-specific corpora and can be translated into various languages accurately, we propose a model called KBioXLM, which transforms the multilingual pretrained model XLM-R into the biomedical domain using a knowledge-anchored approach. We achieve a biomedical multilingual corpus by incorporating three granularity knowledge alignments (entity, fact, and passage levels) into monolingual corpora. Then we design three corresponding training tasks (entity masking, relation masking, and passage relation prediction) and continue training on top of the XLM-R model to enhance its domain cross-lingual ability. To validate the effectiveness of our model, we translate the English benchmarks of multiple tasks into Chinese. Experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms monolingual and multilingual pretrained models in cross-lingual zero-shot and few-shot scenarios, achieving improvements of up to 10+ points. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ngwlh-gl/KBioXLM.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationEMNLP 2023
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages11239-11250
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9798891760615
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2023
Event2023 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 - Singapore, Singapore
Duration: 6 Dec 202310 Dec 2023

Publication series

NameFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Conference

Conference2023 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Country/TerritorySingapore
CitySingapore
Period6/12/2310/12/23

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

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