This repository contains the code of the following paper:

@inproceedings{yermakov-etal-2021-biomedical,
title = "Biomedical Data-to-Text Generation via Fine-Tuning Transformers",
author = "Yermakov, Ruslan  and
  Drago, Nicholas  and
  Ziletti, Angelo",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation",
month = aug,
year = "2021",
address = "Aberdeen, Scotland, UK",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.inlg-1.40",
pages = "364--370",
abstract = "Data-to-text (D2T) generation in the biomedical domain is a promising - yet mostly unexplored - field of research. Here, we apply neural models for   D2T generation to a real-world dataset consisting of package leaflets of European medicines. We show that fine-tuned transformers are able to generate realistic, multi-sentence text from data in the biomedical domain, yet have important limitations. We also release a new dataset (BioLeaflets) for benchmarking D2T generation models in the biomedical domain.",
})

Please cite this work if you use this code in your work or research.

Goal: generate fluent and fact-based descriptions from biomedical data given structured data

We show that fine-tuned transformers are able to generate realistic, multisentence text from data in the biomedical domain, yet have important limitations.

BioLeaflets dataset is publictly available at this link on Zenodo platform.

For this purpose we introduce a new biomedical dataset for Data2Text generation - BioLeaflets, a corpus of 1336 package leaflets of medicines authorised in Europe, which we obtain by scraping the European Medicines Agency (EMA) website. Package leaflets are included in the packaging of medicinal products and contain information to help patients use the product safely and appropriately, under the guidance of their healthcare professional. Each document contains six sections: 1) What is the product and what is it used for 2) What you need to know before you take the product 3) product usage instructions 4) possible side effects, 5) product storage conditions 6) other information.

In our use case we aim to generate package leaflets from structured information about a particular medicine.

However, there is no structured data available for the package leaflet text. Therefore, to create the required input for D2T generation, we augment each document by leveraging named entity recognition (NER) frameworks by Stanza and AWS Comprehend.

The newly released dataset could be further used for benchmarking Data2Text generation models in the biomedical domain.

We present baseline results on BioLeaflets dataset by fine-tuning the following state-of-the-art language models in seq2seq setting:

• T5: a text-to-text transfer transformer model (Raffel et al., 2020).
• BART: denoising autoencoder for pretraining sequence-to-sequence models with transformers (Lewis et al., 2020).

We used Python 3.7 in our experiments.

Install latest version from the master branch on Github by:

git clone <GITHUB-URL>
cd data2text-bioleaflets
pip install -r requirements.txt

If you are using your own data, it must be formatted as one directory with 6 files:

train.source
train.target
val.source
val.target
test.source
test.target

The .source files are the input, the .target files are the desired output.

We prepared BioLeaflets dataset in such format and saved at scripts/data/.

Use the finetune_trainer.py script for fine-tuning T5 and BART models in seq2seq fashion. The script adapted from HuggingFace transformers library.

To see all the possible command line options, run:
python finetune_trainer.py --help

To fine-tune the pre-trained models and reproduce our results in the paper, invoke the training script in the following way:

# indicate path to input dir
export DATA_DIR="~/data2text-bioleaflets/scripts/data/plain"

# indicate path to output dir
export DATA_DIR_OUT="~/data2text-bioleaflets/results/T5_plain"

python scripts/finetune_trainer.py \
--model_name_or_path t5-base \
--data_dir $DATA_DIR \
--output_dir $DATA_DIR_OUT \
--n_train -1 \
--n_val -1 \
--n_test -1 \
--max_target_length 512 \
--val_max_target_length 512 \
--test_max_target_length 512 \
--task summarization \
--save_steps 2000 \
--num_train_epochs 20 \
--save_total_limit 4 \
--do_train True \
--do_eval False \
--do_predict False \
--predict_with_generate False \
--evaluation_strategy no \
--gradient_accumulation_steps 16 \
--per_device_train_batch_size 2 \
--per_device_eval_batch_size 8 \
--learning_rate 1e-3 \
--seed 1

To create target sections for each set of corresponding Entities in BioLeaflets dataset, we use run_eval.py. The computed metric is ROUGE be default.

Predictions for test data:

python scripts/run_eval.py \
$DATA_DIR_OUT \
$DATA_DIR/test.source \
$DATA_DIR_OUT/test_generations_beam_1.txt \
--reference_path $DATA_DIR/test.target \
--score_path $DATA_DIR_OUT/test_scores_beam_1.json \
--device cuda \
--bs 16 \
--num_beams 1

Generations of BioLeaflets test dataset with different models you can find in results/ directory.