Ensemble-based Fine-Tuning Strategy for Temporal Relation Extraction from the Clinical Narrative

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate ensemble methods for fine-tuning transformer-based pretrained models for clinical natural language processing tasks, specifically temporal relation extraction from the clinical narrative. Our experimental results on the THYME data show that ensembling as a fine-tuning strategy can further boost model performance over single learners optimized for hyperparameters. Dynamic snapshot ensembling is particularly beneficial as it fine-tunes a wide array of parameters and results in a 2.8% absolute improvement in F1 over the base single learner.