ALBERT-Based Self-Ensemble Model With Semisupervised Learning and Data Augmentation for Clinical Semantic Textual Similarity Calculation: Algorithm Validation Study

BACKGROUND: In recent years, with increases in the amount of information available and the importance of information screening, increased attention has been paid to the calculation of textual semantic similarity. In the field of medicine, electronic medical records and medical research documents have become important data resources for clinical research. Medical textual semantic similarity calculation has become an urgent problem to be solved. OBJECTIVE: This research aims to solve 2 problems—(1) when the size of medical data sets is small, leading to insufficient learning with understanding of the models and (2) when information is lost in the process of long-distance propagation, causing the models to be unable to grasp key information. METHODS: This paper combines a text data augmentation method and a self-ensemble ALBERT model under semisupervised learning to perform clinical textual semantic similarity calculations. RESULTS: Compared with the methods in the 2019 National Natural Language Processing Clinical Challenges Open Health Natural Language Processing shared task Track on Clinical Semantic Textual Similarity, our method surpasses the best result by 2 percentage points and achieves a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.92. CONCLUSIONS: When the size of medical data set is small, data augmentation can increase the size of the data set and improved semisupervised learning can boost the learning efficiency of the model. Additionally, self-ensemble methods improve the model performance. Our method had excellent performance and has great potential to improve related medical problems.