Improving clinical named entity recognition with global neural attention

  • Guohai Xu
  • , Chengyu Wang
  • , Xiaofeng He*
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

27 Scopus citations

Abstract

Clinical named entity recognition (NER) is a foundational technology to acquire the knowledge within the electronic medical records. Conventional clinical NER methods suffer from heavily feature engineering. Besides, these methods treat NER as a sentence-level task and ignore the long-range contextual dependencies. In this paper, we propose an attention-based neural network architecture to leverage document-level global information to alleviate the problem. The global information is obtained from document represented by pre-trained bidirectional language model (Bi-LM) with neural attention. The parameters of pre-trained Bi-LM which makes use of unlabeled data can be transferred to NER model to further improve the performance. We evaluate our model on 2010 i2b2/VA datasets to verify the effectiveness of leveraging global information and transfer strategy. Our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art method with less labeled data and no feature engineering.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationWeb and Big Data - Second International Joint Conference, APWeb-WAIM 2018, Proceedings
EditorsYi Cai, Yoshiharu Ishikawa, Jianliang Xu
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages264-279
Number of pages16
ISBN (Print)9783319968926
DOIs
StatePublished - 2018
Event2nd Asia Pacific Web and Web-Age Information Management Joint Conference on Web and Big Data, APWeb-WAIM 2018 - Macau, China
Duration: 23 Jul 201825 Jul 2018

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume10988 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference2nd Asia Pacific Web and Web-Age Information Management Joint Conference on Web and Big Data, APWeb-WAIM 2018
Country/TerritoryChina
CityMacau
Period23/07/1825/07/18

Keywords

  • Clinical named entity recognition
  • Language model
  • Neural attention

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