Using FHIR to Construct a Corpus of Clinical Questions Annotated with Logical Forms and Answers.

Journal: AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium
Published Date:

Abstract

This paper describes a novel technique for annotating logical forms and answers for clinical questions by utilizing Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). Such annotations are widely used in building the semantic parsing models (which aim at understanding the precise meaning of natural language questions by converting them to machine-understandable logical forms). These systems focus on reducing the time it takes for a user to get to information present in electronic health records (EHRs). Directly annotating questions with logical forms is a challenging task and involves a time-consuming step of concept normalization annotation. We aim to automate this step using the normalized codes present in a FHIR resource. Using the proposed approach, two annotators curated an annotated dataset of 1000 questions in less than 1 week. To assess the quality of these annotations, we trained a semantic parsing model which achieved an accuracy of 94.2% on this corpus.

Authors

  • Sarvesh Soni
    School of Biomedical Informatics, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX.
  • Meghana Gudala
    School of Biomedical Informatics, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX.
  • Daisy Zhe Wang
    Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
  • Kirk Roberts
    The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, USA.