Precursor-induced conditional random fields: connecting separate entities by induction for improved clinical named entity recognition.

Journal: BMC medical informatics and decision making
Published Date:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: This paper presents a conditional random fields (CRF) method that enables the capture of specific high-order label transition factors to improve clinical named entity recognition performance. Consecutive clinical entities in a sentence are usually separated from each other, and the textual descriptions in clinical narrative documents frequently indicate causal or posterior relationships that can be used to facilitate clinical named entity recognition. However, the CRF that is generally used for named entity recognition is a first-order model that constrains label transition dependency of adjoining labels under the Markov assumption.

Authors

  • Wangjin Lee
    Interdisciplinary Program for Bioengineering, Graduate School, Seoul National University, 103 Daehak-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, 03080, South Korea. Electronic address: jinsamdol@snu.ac.kr.
  • Jinwook Choi
    Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, College of Medicine, Seoul National University 103, Daehak-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, 03080, Republic of Korea. Electronic address: jinchoi@snu.ac.kr.