JoLT: Jointly Learned Representations of Language and Time-Series for Clinical Time-Series Interpretation (Student Abstract)

Time-series and text data are prevalent in healthcare and frequently co-exist, yet they are typically modeled in isolation. Even studies that jointly model time-series and text, do so by converting time-series to images or graphs. We hypothesize that explicitly modeling time-series jointly with text can improve tasks such as summarization and question answering for time-series data, which have received little attention so far. To address this gap, we introduce JoLT to jointly learn desired representations from pre-trained time-series and text models. JoLT utilizes a Querying Transformer (Q-Former) to align the time-series and text representations. Our experiments on a large real-world electrocardiography dataset for medical time-series summarization show that JoLT outperforms state-of-the-art image captioning approaches.