MMBERT: a unified framework for biomedical named entity recognition.

Journal: Medical & biological engineering & computing
Published Date:

Abstract

Named entity recognition (NER) is an important task in natural language processing (NLP). In recent years, NER has attracted much attention in the biomedical field. However, due to the lack of biomedical named entity identification datasets, the complexity and rarity of biomedical named entities and so on, biomedical NER is more difficult than general domain NER. So in this paper, we propose a framework (MMBERT) based on Transformer to solve the problems above. To address the scarcity of biomedical named entity recognition datasets, we introduce ERNIE-Health, a new Chinese language representation model pre-trained on large-scale biomedical text corpora. Because of the complexity and rarity of biomedical named entities, we use the Bert and CW-LSTM structures to get the joint feature vector of word pairs relations. In addition, we design multi-granularity 2D convolution to refine the relationship and representation between word pairs. Finally, we design a convolutional neural network (CNN) structure and a co-predictor to improve the model's generalization capability and prediction accuracy. We have conducted extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, and the experimental results show that our model achieves the best results compared with several baseline models in the experiment.

Authors

  • Lei Fu
    Clinical Specimen Center,Chinese PLA General Hospital,Beijing 100853,China.
  • Zuquan Weng
    The Centre for Big Data Research in Burns and Trauma, Fuzhou University, Fujian Province, China.
  • Jiheng Zhang
    College of Biological Science and Engineering, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, 350000, Fujian Province, China.
  • Haihe Xie
    College of Electromechanical and Information Engineering, PuTian University, PuTian, 351100, Fujian Province, China.
  • Yiqing Cao
    College of Electromechanical and Information Engineering, PuTian University, PuTian, 351100, Fujian Province, China.