lasigeBioTM at SemEval-2023 Task 7: Improving Natural Language Inference Baseline Systems with Domain Ontologies

Abstract

Clinical Trials Reports (CTRs) contain highly valuable health information from which Natural Language Inference (NLI) techniques determine if a given hypothesis can be inferred from a given premise. CTRs are abundant with domain terminology with particular terms that are difficult to understand without prior knowledge. Thus, we proposed to use domain ontologies as a source of external knowledge that could help with the inference process in the SemEval-2023 Task 7: Multi-evidence Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trial Data (NLI4CT). This document describes our participation in subtask 1: Textual Entailment, where Ontologies, NLP techniques, such as tokenization and named-entity recognition, and rule-based approaches are all combined in our approach. We were able to show that inputting annotations from domain ontologies improved the baseline systems.