Leveraging Semantic Type Dependencies for Clinical Named Entity Recognition.

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

Abstract

Previous work on clinical relation extraction from free-text sentences leveraged information about semantic types from clinical knowledge bases as a part of entity representations. In this paper, we exploit additional evidence by also making use of . We encode the relation between a span of tokens matching a Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) concept and other tokens in the sentence. We implement our method and compare against different named entity recognition (NER) architectures (i.e., BiLSTM-CRF and BiLSTM-GCN-CRF) using different pre-trained clinical embeddings (i.e., BERT, BioBERT, UMLSBert). Our experimental results on clinical datasets show that in some cases NER effectiveness can be significantly improved by making use of domain-specific semantic type dependencies. Our work is also the first study generating a matrix encoding to make use of more than three dependencies in one pass for the NER task.

Authors

  • Linh Le
    University of Queensland, Australia linh.le, g.zuccon, g.demartini@uq.edu.au.
  • Guido Zuccon
    Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.
  • Gianluca Demartini
    University of Queensland, Australia linh.le, g.zuccon, g.demartini@uq.edu.au.
  • Genghong Zhao
    School of Computer Science, Engineering Northeastern University, No.195 Chuangxin Road Hunnan District, Shenyang 110169, China.
  • Xia Zhang
    School of Computer Science, Engineering Northeastern University, No.195 Chuangxin Road Hunnan District, Shenyang 110169, China.