We present an overview of the Biomedical Translation Task that was part of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT23). The aim of the task was the automatic translation of biomedical abstracts from the PubMed database. It included twelve language directions, namely, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Russian, from and into English. We received submissions from 18 systems and for all the test sets that we released. Our comparison system was based on ChatGPT 3.5 and performed very well in comparison to many of the submissions.

In the seventh edition of the WMT Biomedical Task, we addressed a total of seven languagepairs, namely English/German, English/French, English/Spanish, English/Portuguese, English/Chinese, English/Russian, English/Italian. This year’s test sets covered three types of biomedical text genre. In addition to scientific abstracts and terminology items used in previous editions, we released test sets of clinical cases. The evaluation of clinical cases translations were given special attention by involving clinicians in the preparation of reference translations and manual evaluation. For the main MEDLINE test sets, we received a total of 609 submissions from 37 teams. For the ClinSpEn sub-task, we had the participation of five teams.

We describe the work of the READ-BioMed team for the preparation of a submission to the SocialDisNER Disease Named Entity Recognition (NER) Task (Task 10) in 2022. We had developed a system for named entity recognition for identifying biomedical concepts in English MEDLINE citations and Spanish clinical text for the LivingNER 2022 challenge. Minimal adaptation of our system was required to perform named entity recognition in the Spanish tweets in the SocialDisNER task, given the availability of Spanish pre-trained language models and the SocialDisNER training data. Minor additions included treatment of emojis and entities in hashtags and Twitter account names.

Scientific documents typically contain numerous entity mentions, while only a subset are directly relevant to the key contributions of the paper. Distinguishing these focus entities from background ones effectively could improve the recovery of relevant documents and the extraction of information from documents. To study the identification of focus entities, we developed two large datasets of disease-causing biological pathogens using MEDLINE, the largest collection of biomedical citations, and PubMed Central, a collection of full text articles. The focus entities were identified using human-curated indexing on these collections. Experiments with machine learning methods to identify focus entities show that transformer methods achieve high precision and recall and that document discourse information is relevant. The work lays the foundation for more targeted retrieval/summarisation of entity-relevant documents.

We present M3 (Multi-level dataset for Multi-document summarisation of Medical studies), a benchmark dataset for evaluating the quality of summarisation systems in the biomedical domain. The dataset contains sets of multiple input documents and target summaries of three levels of complexity: documents, sentences, and propositions. The dataset also includes several levels of annotation, including biomedical entities, direction, and strength of relations between them, and the discourse relationships between the input documents (“contradiction” or “agreement”). We showcase usage scenarios of the dataset by testing 10 generic and domain-specific summarisation models in a zero-shot setting, and introduce a probing task based on counterfactuals to test if models are aware of the direction and strength of the conclusions generated from input studies.

We introduce a grey-box adversarial attack and defence framework for sentiment classification. We address the issues of differentiability, label preservation and input reconstruction for adversarial attack and defence in one unified framework. Our results show that once trained, the attacking model is capable of generating high-quality adversarial examples substantially faster (one order of magnitude less in time) than state-of-the-art attacking methods. These examples also preserve the original sentiment according to human evaluation. Additionally, our framework produces an improved classifier that is robust in defending against multiple adversarial attacking methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/ibm-aur-nlp/adv-def-text-dist.

In developing systems to identify focus entities in scientific literature, we face the problem of discriminating key entities of interest from other potentially relevant entities of the same type mentioned in the articles. We introduce the task of pathogen characterisation. We aim to discriminate mentions of biological pathogens, that are actively studied in the research presented in scientific publications. These are the pathogens that are the focus of direct experimentation in the research, rather than those that are referred to for context or as playing secondary roles. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that these focus entities can be differentiated from other, non-actively studied, pathogens mentioned in articles through analysis of the patterns of mentions across different sections of a scientific paper, that is, using the discourse structure of the paper. We provide an indicative case study with the help of a small data set of PubMed abstracts that have been annotated with actively mentioned pathogens.

In the sixth edition of the WMT Biomedical Task, we addressed a total of eight language pairs, namely English/German, English/French, English/Spanish, English/Portuguese, English/Chinese, English/Russian, English/Italian, and English/Basque. Further, our tests were composed of three types of textual test sets. New to this year, we released a test set of summaries of animal experiments, in addition to the test sets of scientific abstracts and terminologies. We received a total of 107 submissions from 15 teams from 6 countries.

Due to the exponential growth of biomedical literature, event and relation extraction are important tasks in biomedical text mining. Most work only focus on relation extraction, and detect a single entity pair mention on a short span of text, which is not ideal due to long sentences that appear in biomedical contexts. We propose an approach to both relation and event extraction, for simultaneously predicting relationships between all mention pairs in a text. We also perform an empirical study to discuss different network setups for this purpose. The best performing model includes a set of multi-head attentions and convolutions, an adaptation of the transformer architecture, which offers self-attention the ability to strengthen dependencies among related elements, and models the interaction between features extracted by multiple attention heads. Experiment results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state of the art on a set of benchmark biomedical corpora including BioNLP 2009, 2011, 2013 and BioCreative 2017 shared tasks.

Background: Parallel corpora are used to train and evaluate machine translation systems. To alleviate the cost of producing parallel resources for evaluation campaigns, existing corpora are leveraged. However, little information may be available about the methods used for producing the corpus, including translation direction. Objective: To gain insight on MEDLINE parallel corpus used in the biomedical task at the Workshop on Machine Translation in 2019 (WMT 2019). Material and Methods: Contact information for the authors of MEDLINE articles included in the English/Spanish (EN/ES), English/French (EN/FR), and English/Portuguese (EN/PT) WMT 2019 test sets was obtained from PubMed and publisher websites. The authors were asked about their abstract writing practices in a survey. Results: The response rate was above 20%. Authors reported that they are mainly native speakers of languages other than English. Although manual translation, sometimes via professional translation services, was commonly used for abstract translation, authors of articles in the EN/ES and EN/PT sets also relied on post-edited machine translation. Discussion: This study provides a characterization of MEDLINE authors’ language skills and abstract writing practices. Conclusion: The information collected in this study will be used to inform test set design for the next WMT biomedical task.

Machine translation of scientific abstracts and terminologies has the potential to support health professionals and biomedical researchers in some of their activities. In the fifth edition of the WMT Biomedical Task, we addressed a total of eight language pairs. Five language pairs were previously addressed in past editions of the shared task, namely, English/German, English/French, English/Spanish, English/Portuguese, and English/Chinese. Three additional languages pairs were also introduced this year: English/Russian, English/Italian, and English/Basque. The task addressed the evaluation of both scientific abstracts (all language pairs) and terminologies (English/Basque only). We received submissions from a total of 20 teams. For recurring language pairs, we observed an improvement in the translations in terms of automatic scores and qualitative evaluations, compared to previous years.

In the fourth edition of the WMT Biomedical Translation task, we considered a total of six languages, namely Chinese (zh), English (en), French (fr), German (de), Portuguese (pt), and Spanish (es). We performed an evaluation of automatic translations for a total of 10 language directions, namely, zh/en, en/zh, fr/en, en/fr, de/en, en/de, pt/en, en/pt, es/en, and en/es. We provided training data based on MEDLINE abstracts for eight of the 10 language pairs and test sets for all of them. In addition to that, we offered a new sub-task for the translation of terms in biomedical terminologies for the en/es language direction. Higher BLEU scores (close to 0.5) were obtained for the es/en, en/es and en/pt test sets, as well as for the terminology sub-task. After manual validation of the primary runs, some submissions were judged to be better than the reference translations, for instance, for de/en, en/es and es/en.

Machine translation enables the automatic translation of textual documents between languages and can facilitate access to information only available in a given language for non-speakers of this language, e.g. research results presented in scientific publications. In this paper, we provide an overview of the Biomedical Translation shared task in the Workshop on Machine Translation (WMT) 2018, which specifically examined the performance of machine translation systems for biomedical texts. This year, we provided test sets of scientific publications from two sources (EDP and Medline) and for six language pairs (English with each of Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish). We describe the development of the various test sets, the submissions that we received and the evaluations that we carried out. We obtained a total of 39 runs from six teams and some of this year’s BLEU scores were somewhat higher that last year’s, especially for teams that made use of biomedical resources or state-of-the-art MT algorithms (e.g. Transformer). Finally, our manual evaluation scored automatic translations higher than the reference translations for German and Spanish.

Recurrent Neural Network models are the state-of-the-art for Named Entity Recognition (NER). We present two innovations to improve the performance of these models. The first innovation is the introduction of residual connections between the Stacked Recurrent Neural Network model to address the degradation problem of deep neural networks. The second innovation is a bias decoding mechanism that allows the trained system to adapt to non-differentiable and externally computed objectives, such as the entity-based F-measure. Our work improves the state-of-the-art results for both Spanish and English languages on the standard train/development/test split of the CoNLL 2003 Shared Task NER dataset.

The biomedical scientific literature is a rich source of information not only in the English language, for which it is more abundant, but also in other languages, such as Portuguese, Spanish and French. We present the first freely available parallel corpus of scientific publications for the biomedical domain. Documents from the ”Biological Sciences” and ”Health Sciences” categories were retrieved from the Scielo database and parallel titles and abstracts are available for the following language pairs: Portuguese/English (about 86,000 documents in total), Spanish/English (about 95,000 documents) and French/English (about 2,000 documents). Additionally, monolingual data was also collected for all four languages. Sentences in the parallel corpus were automatically aligned and a manual analysis of 200 documents by native experts found that a minimum of 79% of sentences were correctly aligned in all language pairs. We demonstrate the utility of the corpus by running baseline machine translation experiments. We show that for all language pairs, a statistical machine translation system trained on the parallel corpora achieves performance that rivals or exceeds the state of the art in the biomedical domain. Furthermore, the corpora are currently being used in the biomedical task in the First Conference on Machine Translation (WMT’16).

The production of gold standard corpora is time-consuming and costly. We propose an alternative: the ‚silver standard corpus‘ (SSC), a corpus that has been generated by the harmonisation of the annotations that have been delivered from a selection of annotation systems. The systems have to share the type system for the annotations and the harmonisation solution has use a suitable similarity measure for the pair-wise comparison of the annotations. The annotation systems have been evaluated against the harmonised set (630.324 sentences, 15,956,841 tokens). We can demonstrate that the annotation of proteins and genes shows higher diversity across all used annotation solutions leading to a lower agreement against the harmonised set in comparison to the annotations of diseases and species. An analysis of the most frequent annotations from all systems shows that a high agreement amongst systems leads to the selection of terms that are suitable to be kept in the harmonised set. This is the first large-scale approach to generate an annotated corpus from automated annotation systems. Further research is required to understand, how the annotations from different systems have to be combined to produce the best annotation result for a harmonised corpus.