LAILab at Chemotimelines 2024: Finetuning sequence-to-sequence language models for temporal relation extraction towards cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy treatment

AbstractIn this paper, we report our effort to tackle the challenge of extracting chemotimelines from EHR notes across a dataset of three cancer types. We focus on the two subtasks: 1) detection and classification of temporal relations given the annotated chemotherapy events and time expressions and 2) directly extracting patient chemotherapy timelines from EHR notes. We address both subtasks using Large Language Models. Our best-performing methods in both subtasks use Flan-T5, an instruction-tuned language model. Our proposed system achieves the highest average score in both subtasks. Our results underscore the effectiveness of finetuning general-domain large language models in domain-specific and unseen tasks.