Publicly Available Clinical BERT Embeddings
This work addresses a gap for researchers and practitioners in clinical NLP by providing accessible domain-specific embeddings, though it is incremental as it adapts existing methods to a new domain.
The authors tackled the lack of publicly available pre-trained BERT models for clinical text by releasing domain-specific BERT models for generic clinical text and discharge summaries, resulting in performance improvements on three common clinical NLP tasks compared to non-specific embeddings, though with reduced performance on two de-identification tasks.
Contextual word embedding models such as ELMo (Peters et al., 2018) and BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) have dramatically improved performance for many natural language processing (NLP) tasks in recent months. However, these models have been minimally explored on specialty corpora, such as clinical text; moreover, in the clinical domain, no publicly-available pre-trained BERT models yet exist. In this work, we address this need by exploring and releasing BERT models for clinical text: one for generic clinical text and another for discharge summaries specifically. We demonstrate that using a domain-specific model yields performance improvements on three common clinical NLP tasks as compared to nonspecific embeddings. These domain-specific models are not as performant on two clinical de-identification tasks, and argue that this is a natural consequence of the differences between de-identified source text and synthetically non de-identified task text.