Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) can be largely attributed to the advent of pre-trained language models such as BERT and RoBERTa. While these models demonstrate remarkable performance on general datasets, they can struggle in specialized domains such as medicine, where unique domain-specific terminologies, domain-specific abbreviations, and varying document structures are common. This paper explores strategies for adapting these models to domain-specific requirements, primarily through continuous pre-training on domain-specific data. We pre-trained several German medical language models on 2.4B tokens derived from translated public English medical data and 3B tokens of German clinical data. The resulting models were evaluated on various German downstream tasks, including named entity recognition (NER), multi-label classification, and extractive question answering. Our results suggest that models augmented by clinical and translation-based pre-training typically outperform general domain models in medical contexts. We conclude that continuous pre-training has demonstrated the ability to match or even exceed the performance of clinical models trained from scratch. Furthermore, pre-training on clinical data or leveraging translated texts have proven to be reliable methods for domain adaptation in medical NLP tasks.

本文探讨了如何通过在特定领域数据上进行连续预训练，来适应领域特定需求，以提高医学自然语言处理任务的性能。实验证明，通过在临床数据或翻译文本上进行预训练已被证明是在医学领域适应性优化的可靠方法。

针对临床和生物医学文本理解的德语语言模型的综合研究