Abstract
We propose Segment Convolutional Neural Networks (Seg-CNNs) for classifying relations from clinical notes. Seg-CNNs use only word-embedding features without manual feature engineering. Unlike typical CNN models, relations between 2 concepts are identified by simultaneously learning separate representations for text segments in a sentence: preceding, concept1, middle, concept2, and succeeding. We evaluate Seg-CNN on the i2b2/VA relation classification challenge dataset. We show that Seg-CNN achieves a state-of-the-art micro-average F-measure of 0.742 for overall evaluation, 0.686 for classifying medical problem–treatment relations, 0.820 for medical problem–test relations, and 0.702 for medical problem–medical problem relations. We demonstrate the benefits of learning segment-level representations. We show that medical domain word embeddings help improve relation classification. Seg-CNNs can be trained quickly for the i2b2/VA dataset on a graphics processing unit (GPU) platform. These results support the use of CNNs computed over segments of text for classifying medical relations, as they show state-of-the-art performance while requiring no manual feature engineering.
Segment convolutional neural networks (Seg-CNNs) for classifying relations in clinical notes