UU_TAILS at 2019 MEDIQA Challenge: Learning Textual Entailment in the Medical Domain

This article describes the participation of the UU_TAILS team in the 2019 MEDIQA challenge intended to improve domain-specific models in medical and clinical NLP. The challenge consists of 3 tasks: medical language inference (NLI), recognizing textual entailment (RQE) and question answering (QA). Our team participated in tasks 1 and 2 and our best runs achieved a performance accuracy of 0.852 and 0.584 respectively for the test sets. The models proposed for task 1 relied on BERT embeddings and different ensemble techniques. For the RQE task, we trained a traditional multilayer perceptron network based on embeddings generated by the universal sentence encoder.