Analyzing the Effect of Multi-task Learning for Biomedical Named Entity Recognition

Developing high-performing systems for detecting biomedical named entities has major implications. State-of-the-art deep-learning based solutions for entity recognition often require large annotated datasets, which is not available in the biomedical domain. Transfer learning and multi-task learning have been shown to improve performance for low-resource domains. However, the applications of these methods are relatively scarce in the biomedical domain, and a theoretical understanding of why these methods improve the performance is lacking. In this study, we performed an extensive analysis to understand the transferability between different biomedical entity datasets. We found useful measures to predict transferability between these datasets. Besides, we propose combining transfer learning and multi-task learning to improve the performance of biomedical named entity recognition systems, which is not applied before to the best of our knowledge.