In-context learning is a method for improving machine translation in Large Language Models, but its performance is sensitive to the quality of the few-shot example selection. Current retrieval strategies use semantic similarity by computing sentence embeddings, and these methods often require significant computational overhead and specialised expertise. We evaluate the impact of retrieval strategies on translation performance in a specialised domain, comparing traditional, token-based fuzzy matching against semantic sentence embeddings. We use a medical corpus from the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) for the English-Romanian and English-German language pairs, and we evaluate translation quality with automatic metrics and manual evaluation. Our results show that 1-shot and 5-shot prompting significantly outperforms the 0-shot baselines for quality in automatic evaluations for both language pairs, and in manual evaluation for English-German. For the English-Romanian pair, the average scores of the manual evaluation for both quality and ranking follow the same trend, but with no statistical significance. Token-based fuzzy matching overwhelmingly has higher automatic quality scores than embedding-based retrieval.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results on machine translation for high resource language pairs and domains. However, in specialised domains (e.g. medical) LLMs have shown lower performance compared to standard neural machine translation models. The consistency in the machine translation of terminology is crucial for users, researchers, and translators in specialised domains. In this study, we compare the performance between baseline LLMs and instruction-tuned LLMs in the medical domain. In addition, we introduce terminology from specialised medical dictionaries into the instruction formatted datasets for fine-tuning LLMs. The instruction-tuned LLMs significantly outperform the baseline models with automatic metrics. Moreover, the instruction-tuned LLMs produce fewer errors compared to the baseline based on automatic error annotation.

Automatic speech synthesis has seen rapid development and integration in domains as diverse as accessibility services, translation, or language learning platforms. We analyse its integration in a post-editing machine translation (PEMT) environment and the effect this has on quality, productivity, and cognitive effort. We use Bayesian hierarchical modelling to analyse eye-tracking, time-tracking, and error annotation data resulting from an experiment involving 21 professional translators post-editing from English into German in a customised cloud-based CAT environment and listening to the source and/or target texts via speech synthesis. Using speech synthesis in a PEMT task has a non-substantial positive effect on quality, a substantial negative effect on productivity, and a substantial negative effect on the cognitive effort expended on the target text, signifying that participants need to allocate less cognitive effort to the target text.

LT-LiDER is an Erasmus+ cooperation project with two main aims. The first is to map the landscape of technological capabilities required to work as a language and/or translation expert in the digitalised and datafied language industry. The second is to generate training outputs that will help language and translation trainers improve their skills and adopt appropriate pedagogical approaches and strategies for integrating data-driven technology into their language or translation classrooms, with a focus on digital and AI literacy.

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) models allow to translate across multiple languages based on only one system. We study the quality of a domain-adapted MNMT model in the medical domain for English-Romanian with automatic metrics and a human error typology annotation based on the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM). We further expand the MQM typology to include terminology-specific error categories. We compare the out-of-domain MNMT with the in-domain adapted MNMT on a standard test dataset of abstracts from medical publications. The in-domain MNMT model outperforms the out-of-domain MNMT in all measured automatic metrics and produces fewer errors. In addition, we perform the manual annotation over the reference test dataset to study the quality of the reference translations. We identify a high number of omissions, additions, and mistranslations in the reference dataset, and comment on the assumed accuracy of existing datasets. Finally, we compare the correlation between the COMET, BERTScore, and chrF automatic metrics with the MQM annotated translations. COMET shows a better correlation with the MQM scores compared to the other metrics.

When developing models for clinical information retrieval and decision support systems, the discrete outcomes required for training are often missing. These labels need to be extracted from free text in electronic health records. For this extraction process one of the most important contextual properties in clinical text is negation, which indicates the absence of findings. We aimed to improve large scale extraction of labels by comparing three methods for negation detection in Dutch clinical notes. We used the Erasmus Medical Center Dutch Clinical Corpus to compare a rule-based method based on ContextD, a biLSTM model using MedCAT and (finetuned) RoBERTa-based models. We found that both the biLSTM and RoBERTa models consistently outperform the rule-based model in terms of F1 score, precision and recall. In addition, we systematically categorized the classification errors for each model, which can be used to further improve model performance in particular applications. Combining the three models naively was not beneficial in terms of performance. We conclude that the biLSTM and RoBERTa-based models in particular are highly accurate accurate in detecting clinical negations, but that ultimately all three approaches can be viable depending on the use case at hand.

OBJECTIVE: To review and critically appraise published and preprint reports of prognostic models of in-hospital mortality of patients in the intensive-care unit (ICU) based on neural representations (embeddings) of clinical notes. METHODS: PubMed and arXiv were searched up to August 1, 2022. At least two reviewers independently selected the studies that developed a prognostic model of in-hospital mortality of intensive-care patients using free-text represented as embeddings and extracted data using the CHARMS checklist. Risk of bias was assessed using PROBAST. Reporting on the model was assessed with the TRIPOD guideline. To assess the machine learning components that were used in the models, we present a new descriptive framework based on different techniques to represent text and provide predictions from text. The study protocol was registered in the PROSPERO database (CRD42022354602). RESULTS: Eighteen studies out of 2,825 were included. All studies used the publicly-available MIMIC dataset. Context-independent word embeddings are widely used. Model discrimination was provided by all studies (AUROC 0.75-0.96), but measures of calibration were scarce. Seven studies used both structural clinical variables and notes. Model discrimination improved when adding clinical notes to variables. None of the models was externally validated and often a simple train/test split was used for internal validation. Our critical appraisal demonstrated a high risk of bias in all studies and concerns regarding their applicability in clinical practice. CONCLUSION: All studies used a neural architecture for prediction and were based on one publicly available dataset. Clinical notes were reported to improve predictive performance when used in addition to only clinical variables. Most studies had methodological, reporting, and applicability issues. We recommend reporting both model discrimination and calibration, using additional data sources, and using more robust evaluation strategies, including prospective and external validation. Finally, sharing data and code is encouraged to improve study reproducibility.

Interest in Machine Learning applications to tackle clinical and biological problems is increasing. This is driven by promising results reported in many research papers, the increasing number of AI-based software products, and by the general interest in Artificial Intelligence to solve complex problems. It is therefore of importance to improve the quality of machine learning output and add safeguards to support their adoption. In addition to regulatory and logistical strategies, a crucial aspect is to detect when a Machine Learning model is not able to generalize to new unseen instances, which may originate from a population distant to that of the training population or from an under-represented subpopulation. As a result, the prediction of the machine learning model for these instances may be often wrong, given that the model is applied outside its "reliable" space of work, leading to a decreasing trust of the final users, such as clinicians. For this reason, when a model is deployed in practice, it would be important to advise users when the model's predictions may be unreliable, especially in high-stakes applications, including those in healthcare. Yet, reliability assessment of each machine learning prediction is still poorly addressed. Here, we review approaches that can support the identification of unreliable predictions, we harmonize the notation and terminology of relevant concepts, and we highlight and extend possible interrelationships and overlap among concepts. We then demonstrate, on simulated and real data for ICU in-hospital death prediction, a possible integrative framework for the identification of reliable and unreliable predictions. To do so, our proposed approach implements two complementary principles, namely the density principle and the local fit principle. The density principle verifies that the instance we want to evaluate is similar to the training set. The local fit principle verifies that the trained model performs well on training subsets that are more similar to the instance under evaluation. Our work can contribute to consolidating work in machine learning especially in medicine.

In this work, we propose to model the interaction between visual and textual features for multi-modal neural machine translation (MMT) through a latent variable model.This latent variable can be seen as a multi-modal stochastic embedding of an image and its description in a foreign language.It is used in a target-language decoder and also to predict image features.Importantly, our model formulation utilises visual and textual inputs during training but does not require that images be available at test time.We show that our latent variable MMT formulation improves considerably over strong baselines, including a multi-task learning approach (Elliott and Kádár, 2017) and a conditional variational auto-encoder approach (Toyama et al., 2016).Finally, we show improvements due to (i) predicting image features in addition to only conditioning on them, (ii) imposing a constraint on the KL term to promote models with nonnegligible mutual information between inputs and latent variable, and (iii) by training on additional target-language image descriptions (i.e.synthetic data).

Miguel Rios, Wilker Aziz, Khalil Sima’an. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers). 2018.