Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capability to solve a wide range of tasks. However, despite their success across various tasks, no prior work has investigated their capability in the biomedical domain yet. To this end, this paper aims to evaluate the performance of LLMs on benchmark biomedical tasks. For this purpose, a comprehensive evaluation of 4 popular LLMs in 6 diverse biomedical tasks across 26 datasets has been conducted. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that conducts an extensive evaluation and comparison of various LLMs in the biomedical domain. Interestingly, we find based on our evaluation that in biomedical datasets that have smaller training sets, zero-shot LLMs even outperform the current state-of-the-art models when they were fine-tuned only on the training set of these datasets. This suggests that pre-training on large text corpora makes LLMs quite specialized even in the biomedical domain. We also find that not a single LLM can outperform other LLMs in all tasks, with the performance of different LLMs may vary depending on the task. While their performance is still quite poor in comparison to the biomedical models that were fine-tuned on large training sets, our findings demonstrate that LLMs have the potential to be a valuable tool for various biomedical tasks that lack large annotated data.

Recent years have witnessed a substantial increase in the use of deep learning to solve various natural language processing (NLP) problems. Early deep learning models were constrained by their sequential or unidirectional nature, such that they struggled to capture the contextual relationships across text inputs. The introduction of bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) leads to a robust encoder for the transformer model that can understand the broader context and deliver state-of-the-art performance across various NLP tasks. This has inspired researchers and practitioners to apply BERT to practical problems, such as information retrieval (IR). A survey that focuses on a comprehensive analysis of prevalent approaches that apply pretrained transformer encoders like BERT to IR can thus be useful for academia and the industry. In light of this, we revisit a variety of BERT-based methods in this survey, cover a wide range of techniques of IR, and group them into six high-level categories: (i) handling long documents, (ii) integrating semantic information, (iii) balancing effectiveness and efficiency, (iv) predicting the weights of terms, (v) query expansion, and (vi) document expansion. We also provide links to resources, including datasets and toolkits, for BERT-based IR systems. Additionally, we highlight the advantages of employing encoder-based BERT models in contrast to recent large language models like ChatGPT, which are decoder-based and demand extensive computational resources. Finally, we summarize the comprehensive outcomes of the survey and suggest directions for future research in the area.

The advent of recent Natural Language Processing technology has led human and machine interactions more toward conversation. In Conversational Search Systems (CSS) like chatbots and Virtual Personal Assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Assistant, both user and device have a limited platform to communicate through chatting or voice. In the information-seeking process, often users do not know how to properly describe their information need in a machine understandable language. Consequently, it is hard for the assistant agent to predict the user’s intent and yield relevant results by only relying on the original query. Studies have shown many unsatisfactory results can be enhanced with the benefit of CSS, which can dig deeper into the user’s query to reveal the real need. This survey intends to provide a comprehensive and comparative overview ofambiguous query clarificationtask in the context of conversational search technology. We investigate different approaches, their evaluation methods, and future work. We also address the importance of understanding a query for retrieving the most relevant document(s) and satisfying user’s need by predicting their potential request. This work provides an overview of characteristics of ambiguous queries and contributes to better understanding of the existing technologies and challenges in CSS focus on disambiguation of unclear queries from various dimensions.

Recommender systems play a pivotal role in helping users navigate a vast selection of products and services. On online platforms, users have the opportunity to share feedback in various modes, such as numerical ratings, textual reviews, and likes/dislikes. Traditional recommendation systems rely on users’ explicit ratings or implicit interactions (e.g., likes, clicks, shares, and saves) to learn user preferences and item characteristics. Beyond numerical ratings, textual reviews provide insights into users’ fine-grained preferences and item features. Analyzing these reviews is crucial for enhancing the performance and explainability of personalized recommendation results. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the development in review-based recommender systems over recent years, highlighting the importance of reviews in recommender systems, as well as the challenges associated with extracting features from reviews and integrating them into ratings. Specifically, we introduce a classification scheme in terms of both the integration of reviews into recommendation systems and the technical methodology. Additionally, we summarize the state-of-the-art methods, analyzing their unique features, effectiveness, and limitations. The study also presents the various evaluation metrics, comparative analysis, datasets, and real-world applications of review-based recommendation systems. Finally, we propose potential directions for future research, including multi-modal data integration, multi-criteria rating information, and ethical considerations.

The Query-Focused Text Summarization (QFTS) task aims at building systems that generate the summary of the text document(s) based on the given query. A key challenge in addressing this task is the lack of large labeled data for training the summarization model. In this article, we address this challenge by exploring a series of domain adaptation techniques. Given the recent success of pre-trained transformer models in a wide range of natural language processing tasks, we utilize such models to generate abstractive summaries for the QFTS task for both single-document and multi-document scenarios. For domain adaptation, we apply a variety of techniques using pre-trained transformer-based summarization models including transfer learning, weakly supervised learning, and distant supervision. Extensive experiments on six datasets show that our proposed approach is very effective in generating abstractive summaries for the QFTS task while setting a new state-of-the-art result in several datasets across a set of automatic and human evaluation metrics.