Boundary identification of events in clinical named entity recognition
This work addresses the need for accurate term span detection in clinical texts to support decision-making applications, representing an incremental improvement in a domain-specific task.
The paper tackled the problem of precise boundary identification in clinical named entity recognition, showing that sequence labeling representations and post-processing techniques significantly improve strict boundary identification of clinical events using conditional random fields.
The problem of named entity recognition in the medical/clinical domain has gained increasing attention do to its vital role in a wide range of clinical decision support applications. The identification of complete and correct term span is vital for further knowledge synthesis (e.g., coding/mapping concepts thesauruses and classification standards). This paper investigates boundary adjustment by sequence labeling representations models and post-processing techniques in the problem of clinical named entity recognition (recognition of clinical events). Using current state-of-the-art sequence labeling algorithm (conditional random fields), we show experimentally that sequence labeling representation and post-processing can be significantly helpful in strict boundary identification of clinical events.