Investigating the impact of weakly supervised data on text mining models of publication transparency: a case study on randomized controlled trials

Lack of large quantities of annotated data is a major barrier in developing effective text mining models of biomedical literature. In this study, we explored weak supervision strategies to improve the accuracy of text classification models developed for assessing methodological transparency of randomized controlled trial (RCT) publications. Specifically, we used Snorkel, a framework to programmatically build training sets, and UMLS-EDA, a data augmentation method that leverages a small number of existing examples to generate new training instances, for weak supervision and assessed their effect on a BioBERT-based text classification model proposed for the task in previous work. Performance improvements due to weak supervision were limited and were surpassed by gains from hyperparameter tuning. Our analysis suggests that refinements to the weak supervision strategies to better deal with multi-label case could be beneficial.