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Clinical entity recognition using structural support vector machines with rich features

  • Buzhou Tang
  • , Hongxin Cao
  • , Yonghui Wu
  • , Min Jiang
  • , Hua Xu*
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • Vanderbilt University
  • Naval Medical University

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

Abstract

Named entity recognition (NER) is an important task for natural language processing (NLP) of clinical text. Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), a sequential labeling algorithm, and Support Vector Machines (SVMs), which is based on large margin theory, are two typical machine learning algorithms that have been widely applied to NER tasks, including clinical entity recognition. However, Structural Support Vector Machines (SSVMs), an algorithm that combines the advantages of both CRFs and SVMs, has not been investigated for clinical text processing. In this study, we applied the SSVMs algorithm to the Concept Extraction task of the 2010 i2b2 clinical NLP challenge, which was to recognize entities of medical problems, treatments, and tests from hospital discharge summaries. Using the same training (N = 27,837) and test (N = 45,009) sets in the challenge, our evaluation showed that the SSVMs-based NER system required less training time, while achieved better performance than the CRFs-based system for clinical entity recognition, when same features were used. Our study also demonstrated that rich features such as unsupervised word representations improved the performance of clinical entity recognition. When rich features were integrated with SSVMs, our system achieved a highest F-measure of 85.74% on the test set of 2010 i2b2 NLP challenge, which outperformed the best system reported in the challenge by 0.5%.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationDTMBIO'12 - Proceedings of the 6th ACM International Workshop on Data and Text Mining in Biomedical Informatics, Co-located with CIKM 2012
Pages13-19
Number of pages7
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes
Event6th ACM International Workshop on Data and Text Mining in Biomedical Informatics, DTMBIO 2012, in Conjunction with the 21st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2012 - Maui, HI, United States
Duration: 29 Oct 201229 Oct 2012

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Proceedings

Conference

Conference6th ACM International Workshop on Data and Text Mining in Biomedical Informatics, DTMBIO 2012, in Conjunction with the 21st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2012
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityMaui, HI
Period29/10/1229/10/12

Keywords

  • Conditional random fields
  • Named entity recognition
  • Natural language processing
  • Structural support vector machines
  • Support vector machines

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