Biomedical Argument Mining Based on Sequential Multi-Task Learning

Biomedical argument mining aims to automatically identify and extract the argumentative structure in biomedical text. It helps to determine not only what positions people adopt, but also why they hold such opinions, which provides valuable insights into medical decision making. Generally, biomedical argument mining consists of three subtasks: argument component identification, argument component classification and relation identification. Current approaches employ conventional multi-task learning framework for jointly addressing the latter two subtasks, and achieve some success. However, explicit sequential dependency between these two subtasks is ignored, which is crucial for accurate biomedical argument mining. Moreover, relation identification is conducted solely based on the argument component pair without considering its potentially valuable context. Therefore, in this paper, a novel sequential multi-task learning approach is proposed for biomedical argument mining. Specifically, to model explicit sequential dependency between argument component classification and relation identification, an information transfer strategy is employed to capture the information of argument component type that is transferred to relation identification. Furthermore, graph convolutional network is employed to model dependency relation among the related argument component pairs. The proposed method has been evaluated on a benchmark dataset and the experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.