Ensembles for clinical entity extraction

Resumen

Health records are a valuable source of clinical knowledge and Natural Language Processing techniques have previously been applied to the text in health records for a number of applications. Often, a first step in clinical text processing is clinical entity recognition; identifying, for example, drugs, disorders, and body parts in clinical text. However, most of this work has focused on records in English.Therefore, this work aims to improve clinical entity recognition for languages other than English by comparing the same methods on two different languages, specifically by employing ensemble methods. Models were created for Spanish and Swedish health records using SVM, Perceptron, and CRF and four different feature sets, including unsupervised features. Finally, the models were combined in ensembles. Weighted voting was applied according to the models individual F-scores. In conclusion, the ensembles improved the overall performance for Spanish and the precision for Swedish.