A Self-Learning Resource-Efficient Re-Ranking Method for Clinical Trials Search

Maciej Rybinski, Vincent Nguyen, Sarvnaz Karimi

Abstract: Complex search scenarios, such as those in biomedical settings, can be challenging. One such scenario is matching a patient's profile to relevant clinical trials. There are multiple criteria that should match for a document (clinical trial) to be considered relevant to a query (patient's profile represented with an admission note). While different neural ranking methods have been proposed for searching clinical trials, resource-efficient approaches to ranker training are less studied. A resource-efficient method uses training data in moderation. We propose a self-learning reranking method that achieves results comparable to those of more complicated, fully supervised, systems. Our experiments demonstrate our method's robustness and competitiveness compared to the state-of-the-art approaches in clinical trial search.