Dataset and Enhanced Model for Eligibility Criteria-to-SQL Semantic Parsing
Clinical trials often require that patients meet eligibility criteria (e.g., have specific conditions) to ensure the safety and the effectiveness of studies. However, retrieving eligible patients for a trial from the electronic health record (EHR) database remains a challenging task for clinicians since it requires not only medical knowledge about eligibility criteria, but also an adequate understanding of structured query language (SQL). In this paper, we introduce a new dataset that includes the first-of-its-kind eligibility-criteria corpus and the corresponding queries for criteria-to-sql (Criteria2SQL), a task translating the eligibility criteria to executable SQL queries. Compared to existing datasets, the queries in the dataset here are derived from the eligibility criteria of clinical trials and include \textit{Order-sensitive, Counting-based, and Boolean-type} cases which are not seen before. In addition to the dataset, we propose a novel neural semantic parser as a strong baseline model. Extensive experiments show that the proposed parser outperforms existing state-of-the-art general-purpose text-to-sql models while highlighting the challenges presented by the new dataset. The uniqueness and the diversity of the dataset leave a lot of research opportunities for future improvement.
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