Federated pretraining and fine tuning of BERT using clinical notes from multiple silos

Abstract: Large scale contextual representation models, such as BERT, have significantly advanced NLP in recently years. However, in certain area like healthcare, accessing diverse large scale text data from multiple institutions is extremely challenging due to privacy and regulatory reasons. In this article, we show that it is possible to both pretrain and fine tune BERT models in a federated manner using clinical texts from different silos without moving the data.