scholarly journals Multi-task learning for Chinese clinical named entity recognition with external knowledge

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ming Cheng ◽  
Shufeng Xiong ◽  
Fei Li ◽  
Pan Liang ◽  
Jianbo Gao

Abstract Background Named entity recognition (NER) on Chinese electronic medical/healthcare records has attracted significantly attentions as it can be applied to building applications to understand these records. Most previous methods have been purely data-driven, requiring high-quality and large-scale labeled medical data. However, labeled data is expensive to obtain, and these data-driven methods are difficult to handle rare and unseen entities. Methods To tackle these problems, this study presents a novel multi-task deep neural network model for Chinese NER in the medical domain. We incorporate dictionary features into neural networks, and a general secondary named entity segmentation is used as auxiliary task to improve the performance of the primary task of named entity recognition. Results In order to evaluate the proposed method, we compare it with other currently popular methods, on three benchmark datasets. Two of the datasets are publicly available, and the other one is constructed by us. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves 91.07% average f-measure on the two public datasets and 87.05% f-measure on private dataset. Conclusions The comparison results of different models demonstrated the effectiveness of our model. The proposed model outperformed traditional statistical models.

Information ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoyu Han ◽  
Yue Zhang ◽  
Wenkai Zhang ◽  
Tinglei Huang

Relation extraction is a vital task in natural language processing. It aims to identify the relationship between two specified entities in a sentence. Besides information contained in the sentence, additional information about the entities is verified to be helpful in relation extraction. Additional information such as entity type getting by NER (Named Entity Recognition) and description provided by knowledge base both have their limitations. Nevertheless, there exists another way to provide additional information which can overcome these limitations in Chinese relation extraction. As Chinese characters usually have explicit meanings and can carry more information than English letters. We suggest that characters that constitute the entities can provide additional information which is helpful for the relation extraction task, especially in large scale datasets. This assumption has never been verified before. The main obstacle is the lack of large-scale Chinese relation datasets. In this paper, first, we generate a large scale Chinese relation extraction dataset based on a Chinese encyclopedia. Second, we propose an attention-based model using the characters that compose the entities. The result on the generated dataset shows that these characters can provide useful information for the Chinese relation extraction task. By using this information, the attention mechanism we used can recognize the crucial part of the sentence that can express the relation. The proposed model outperforms other baseline models on our Chinese relation extraction dataset.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 435
Author(s):  
Ni Putu Ayu Sherly Anggita S ◽  
Ngurah Agus Sanjaya ER

In Natural Language Processing (NLP), Named Recognition Entity (NER) is a sub-discussion widely used for research. The NER’s main task is to help identify and detect the entity-named in the sentence, such as personal names, locations, organizations, and many other entities. In this paper, we present a Location NER system for Balinese texts using a rule-based approach. NER in the Balinese document is an essential and challenging task because there is no research on this. The rule-based approach using human-made rules to extract entity name is one of the most famous ways to extract entity names as well as machine learning. The system aims to identify proper names in the corpus and classify them into locations class. Precision, recall, and F-measure used for the evaluation. Our results show that our proposed model is trustworthy enough, having average recall, precision, and f-measure values for the specific location entity, respectively, 0.935, 0.936, and 0.92. These results prove that our system is capable of recognizing named-entities of Balinese texts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Huiwei Zhou ◽  
Zhe Liu ◽  
Chengkun Lang ◽  
Yibin Xu ◽  
Yingyu Lin ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Biomedical named entity recognition is one of the most essential tasks in biomedical information extraction. Previous studies suffer from inadequate annotated datasets, especially the limited knowledge contained in them. Methods To remedy the above issue, we propose a novel Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (BioNER) framework with label re-correction and knowledge distillation strategies, which could not only create large and high-quality datasets but also obtain a high-performance recognition model. Our framework is inspired by two points: (1) named entity recognition should be considered from the perspective of both coverage and accuracy; (2) trustable annotations should be yielded by iterative correction. Firstly, for coverage, we annotate chemical and disease entities in a large-scale unlabeled dataset by PubTator to generate a weakly labeled dataset. For accuracy, we then filter it by utilizing multiple knowledge bases to generate another weakly labeled dataset. Next, the two datasets are revised by a label re-correction strategy to construct two high-quality datasets, which are used to train two recognition models, respectively. Finally, we compress the knowledge in the two models into a single recognition model with knowledge distillation. Results Experiments on the BioCreative V chemical-disease relation corpus and NCBI Disease corpus show that knowledge from large-scale datasets significantly improves the performance of BioNER, especially the recall of it, leading to new state-of-the-art results. Conclusions We propose a framework with label re-correction and knowledge distillation strategies. Comparison results show that the two perspectives of knowledge in the two re-corrected datasets respectively are complementary and both effective for BioNER.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shintaro Tsuji ◽  
Andrew Wen ◽  
Naoki Takahashi ◽  
Hongjian Zhang ◽  
Katsuhiko Ogasawara ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND Named entity recognition (NER) plays an important role in extracting the features of descriptions for mining free-text radiology reports. However, the performance of existing NER tools is limited because the number of entities depends on its dictionary lookup. Especially, the recognition of compound terms is very complicated because there are a variety of patterns. OBJECTIVE The objective of the study is to develop and evaluate a NER tool concerned with compound terms using the RadLex for mining free-text radiology reports. METHODS We leveraged the clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System (cTAKES) to develop customized pipelines using both RadLex and SentiWordNet (a general-purpose dictionary, GPD). We manually annotated 400 of radiology reports for compound terms (Cts) in noun phrases and used them as the gold standard for the performance evaluation (precision, recall, and F-measure). Additionally, we also created a compound-term-enhanced dictionary (CtED) by analyzing false negatives (FNs) and false positives (FPs), and applied it for another 100 radiology reports for validation. We also evaluated the stem terms of compound terms, through defining two measures: an occurrence ratio (OR) and a matching ratio (MR). RESULTS The F-measure of the cTAKES+RadLex+GPD was 32.2% (Precision 92.1%, Recall 19.6%) and that of combined the CtED was 67.1% (Precision 98.1%, Recall 51.0%). The OR indicated that stem terms of “effusion”, "node", "tube", and "disease" were used frequently, but it still lacks capturing Cts. The MR showed that 71.9% of stem terms matched with that of ontologies and RadLex improved about 22% of the MR from the cTAKES default dictionary. The OR and MR revealed that the characteristics of stem terms would have the potential to help generate synonymous phrases using ontologies. CONCLUSIONS We developed a RadLex-based customized pipeline for parsing radiology reports and demonstrated that CtED and stem term analysis has the potential to improve dictionary-based NER performance toward expanding vocabularies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Yingwen Fu ◽  
Nankai Lin ◽  
Xiaotian Lin ◽  
Shengyi Jiang

Named entity recognition (NER) is fundamental to natural language processing (NLP). Most state-of-the-art researches on NER are based on pre-trained language models (PLMs) or classic neural models. However, these researches are mainly oriented to high-resource languages such as English. While for Indonesian, related resources (both in dataset and technology) are not yet well-developed. Besides, affix is an important word composition for Indonesian language, indicating the essentiality of character and token features for token-wise Indonesian NLP tasks. However, features extracted by currently top-performance models are insufficient. Aiming at Indonesian NER task, in this paper, we build an Indonesian NER dataset (IDNER) comprising over 50 thousand sentences (over 670 thousand tokens) to alleviate the shortage of labeled resources in Indonesian. Furthermore, we construct a hierarchical structured-attention-based model (HSA) for Indonesian NER to extract sequence features from different perspectives. Specifically, we use an enhanced convolutional structure as well as an enhanced attention structure to extract deeper features from characters and tokens. Experimental results show that HSA establishes competitive performance on IDNER and three benchmark datasets.


2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-39
Author(s):  
Zara Nasar ◽  
Syed Waqar Jaffry ◽  
Muhammad Kamran Malik

With the advent of Web 2.0, there exist many online platforms that result in massive textual-data production. With ever-increasing textual data at hand, it is of immense importance to extract information nuggets from this data. One approach towards effective harnessing of this unstructured textual data could be its transformation into structured text. Hence, this study aims to present an overview of approaches that can be applied to extract key insights from textual data in a structured way. For this, Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction are being majorly addressed in this review study. The former deals with identification of named entities, and the latter deals with problem of extracting relation between set of entities. This study covers early approaches as well as the developments made up till now using machine learning models. Survey findings conclude that deep-learning-based hybrid and joint models are currently governing the state-of-the-art. It is also observed that annotated benchmark datasets for various textual-data generators such as Twitter and other social forums are not available. This scarcity of dataset has resulted into relatively less progress in these domains. Additionally, the majority of the state-of-the-art techniques are offline and computationally expensive. Last, with increasing focus on deep-learning frameworks, there is need to understand and explain the under-going processes in deep architectures.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Runyu Fan ◽  
Lizhe Wang ◽  
Jining Yan ◽  
Weijing Song ◽  
Yingqian Zhu ◽  
...  

Constructing a knowledge graph of geological hazards literature can facilitate the reuse of geological hazards literature and provide a reference for geological hazard governance. Named entity recognition (NER), as a core technology for constructing a geological hazard knowledge graph, has to face the challenges that named entities in geological hazard literature are diverse in form, ambiguous in semantics, and uncertain in context. This can introduce difficulties in designing practical features during the NER classification. To address the above problem, this paper proposes a deep learning-based NER model; namely, the deep, multi-branch BiGRU-CRF model, which combines a multi-branch bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) layer and a conditional random field (CRF) model. In an end-to-end and supervised process, the proposed model automatically learns and transforms features by a multi-branch bidirectional GRU layer and enhances the output with a CRF layer. Besides the deep, multi-branch BiGRU-CRF model, we also proposed a pattern-based corpus construction method to construct the corpus needed for the deep, multi-branch BiGRU-CRF model. Experimental results indicated the proposed deep, multi-branch BiGRU-CRF model outperformed state-of-the-art models. The proposed deep, multi-branch BiGRU-CRF model constructed a large-scale geological hazard literature knowledge graph containing 34,457 entities nodes and 84,561 relations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 8164-8171
Author(s):  
Bing Li ◽  
Shifeng Liu ◽  
Yifang Sun ◽  
Wei Wang ◽  
Xiang Zhao

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in identifying named entities with nested structures. Existing models only make independent typing decisions on the entire entity span while ignoring strong modification relations between sub-entity types. In this paper, we present a novel Recursively Binary Modification model for nested named entity recognition. Our model utilizes the modification relations among sub-entities types to infer the head component on top of a Bayesian framework and uses entity head as a strong evidence to determine the type of the entity span. The process is recursive, allowing lower-level entities to help better model those on the outer-level. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first effort that uses modification relation in nested NER task. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models in nested NER tasks, and delivers competitive results with state-of-the-art models in flat NER task, without relying on any extra annotations or NLP tools.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (18) ◽  
pp. 3658 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianliang Yang ◽  
Yuenan Liu ◽  
Minghui Qian ◽  
Chenghua Guan ◽  
Xiangfei Yuan

Clinical named entity recognition is an essential task for humans to analyze large-scale electronic medical records efficiently. Traditional rule-based solutions need considerable human effort to build rules and dictionaries; machine learning-based solutions need laborious feature engineering. For the moment, deep learning solutions like Long Short-term Memory with Conditional Random Field (LSTM–CRF) achieved considerable performance in many datasets. In this paper, we developed a multitask attention-based bidirectional LSTM–CRF (Att-biLSTM–CRF) model with pretrained Embeddings from Language Models (ELMo) in order to achieve better performance. In the multitask system, an additional task named entity discovery was designed to enhance the model’s perception of unknown entities. Experiments were conducted on the 2010 Informatics for Integrating Biology & the Bedside/Veterans Affairs (I2B2/VA) dataset. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art solution both on the single model and ensemble model. Our work proposes an approach to improve the recall in the clinical named entity recognition task based on the multitask mechanism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205395172096886
Author(s):  
Mark Altaweel ◽  
Tasoula Georgiou Hadjitofi

The marketisation of heritage has been a major topic of interest among heritage specialists studying how the online marketplace shapes sales. Missing from that debate is a large-scale analysis seeking to understand market trends on popular selling platforms such as eBay. Sites such as eBay can inform what heritage items are of interest to the wider public, and thus what is potentially of greater cultural value, while also demonstrating monetary value trends. To better understand the sale of heritage on eBay’s international site, this work applies named entity recognition using conditional random fields, a method within natural language processing, and word dictionaries that inform on market trends. The methods demonstrate how Western markets, particularly the US and UK, have dominated sales for different cultures. Roman, Egyptian, Viking (Norse/Dane) and Near East objects are sold the most. Surprisingly, Cyprus and Egypt, two countries with relatively strict prohibition against the sale of heritage items, make the top 10 selling countries on eBay. Objects such as jewellery, statues and figurines, and religious items sell in relatively greater numbers, while masks and vessels (e.g. vases) sell at generally higher prices. Metal, stone and terracotta are commonly sold materials. More rare materials, such as those made of ivory, papyrus or wood, have relatively higher prices. Few sellers dominate the market, where in some months 40% of sales are controlled by the top 10 sellers. The tool used for the study is freely provided, demonstrating benefits in an automated approach to understanding sale trends.


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