scholarly journals Ensemble of Deep Masked Language Models for Effective Named Entity Recognition in Health and Life Science Corpora

Author(s):  
Nona Naderi ◽  
Julien Knafou ◽  
Jenny Copara ◽  
Patrick Ruch ◽  
Douglas Teodoro

The health and life science domains are well known for their wealth of named entities found in large free text corpora, such as scientific literature and electronic health records. To unlock the value of such corpora, named entity recognition (NER) methods are proposed. Inspired by the success of transformer-based pretrained models for NER, we assess how individual and ensemble of deep masked language models perform across corpora of different health and life science domains—biology, chemistry, and medicine—available in different languages—English and French. Individual deep masked language models, pretrained on external corpora, are fined-tuned on task-specific domain and language corpora and ensembled using classical majority voting strategies. Experiments show statistically significant improvement of the ensemble models over an individual BERT-based baseline model, with an overall best performance of 77% macro F1-score. We further perform a detailed analysis of the ensemble results and show how their effectiveness changes according to entity properties, such as length, corpus frequency, and annotation consistency. The results suggest that the ensembles of deep masked language models are an effective strategy for tackling NER across corpora from the health and life science domains.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nona Naderi ◽  
Julien Knafou ◽  
Jenny Copara ◽  
Patrick Ruch ◽  
Douglas Teodoro

AbstractThe health and life science domains are well known for their wealth of entities. These entities are presented as free text in large corpora, such as biomedical scientific and electronic health records. To enable the secondary use of these corpora and unlock their value, named entity recognition (NER) methods are proposed. Inspired by the success of deep masked language models, we present an ensemble approach for NER using these models. Results show statistically significant improvement of the ensemble models over baselines based on individual models in multiple domains - chemical, clinical and wet lab - and languages - English and French. The ensemble model achieves an overall performance of 79.2% macro F1-score, a 4.6 percentage point increase upon the baseline in multiple domains and languages. These results suggests that ensembles are a more effective strategy for tackling NER. We further perform a detailed analysis of their performance based on a set of entity properties.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Chaojie Wen ◽  
Tao Chen ◽  
Xudong Jia ◽  
Jiang Zhu

Abstract Medical named entity recognition (NER) is an area in which medical named entities are recognized from medical texts, such as diseases, drugs, surgery reports, anatomical parts, examination documents, and so on. Conventional medical NER methods do not make full use of un-labelled medical texts embedded in medical documents. To address this issue, we propose a medical NER approach based on pre-trained language models and a domain dictionary. First, we construct a medical entity dictionary by extracting medical entities from labelled medical texts and collecting medical entities from other resources, such as the Yidu-N4K dataset. Second, we employ this dictionary to train domain-specific pre-trained language models using un-labelled medical texts. Third, we employ a pseudo labelling mechanism in un-labelled medical texts to automatically annotate texts and create pseudo labels. Fourth, the BiLSTM-CRF sequence tagging model is used to fine-tune the pre-trained language models. Our experiments on the un-labelled medical texts, which are extracted from Chinese electronic medical records, show that the proposed NER approach enables the strict and relaxed F1 scores to be 88.7% and 95.3%, respectively.


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.


Data ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Gonçalo Carnaz ◽  
Mário Antunes ◽  
Vitor Beires Nogueira

Criminal investigations collect and analyze the facts related to a crime, from which the investigators can deduce evidence to be used in court. It is a multidisciplinary and applied science, which includes interviews, interrogations, evidence collection, preservation of the chain of custody, and other methods and techniques of investigation. These techniques produce both digital and paper documents that have to be carefully analyzed to identify correlations and interactions among suspects, places, license plates, and other entities that are mentioned in the investigation. The computerized processing of these documents is a helping hand to the criminal investigation, as it allows the automatic identification of entities and their relations, being some of which difficult to identify manually. There exists a wide set of dedicated tools, but they have a major limitation: they are unable to process criminal reports in the Portuguese language, as an annotated corpus for that purpose does not exist. This paper presents an annotated corpus, composed of a collection of anonymized crime-related documents, which were extracted from official and open sources. The dataset was produced as the result of an exploratory initiative to collect crime-related data from websites and conditioned-access police reports. The dataset was evaluated and a mean precision of 0.808, recall of 0.722, and F1-score of 0.733 were obtained with the classification of the annotated named-entities present in the crime-related documents. This corpus can be employed to benchmark Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and tools to detect and correlate entities in the documents. Some examples are sentence detection, named-entity recognition, and identification of terms related to the criminal domain.


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.


Author(s):  
Elena Álvarez-Mellado ◽  
María Luisa Díez-Platas ◽  
Pablo Ruiz-Fabo ◽  
Helena Bermúdez ◽  
Salvador Ros ◽  
...  

AbstractMedieval documents are a rich source of historical data. Performing named-entity recognition (NER) on this genre of texts can provide us with valuable historical evidence. However, traditional NER categories and schemes are usually designed with modern documents in mind (i.e. journalistic text) and the general-domain NER annotation schemes fail to capture the nature of medieval entities. In this paper we explore the challenges of performing named-entity annotation on a corpus of Spanish medieval documents: we discuss the mismatches that arise when applying traditional NER categories to a corpus of Spanish medieval documents and we propose a novel humanist-friendly TEI-compliant annotation scheme and guidelines intended to capture the particular nature of medieval entities.


2014 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 469-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khaled Shaalan

As more and more Arabic textual information becomes available through the Web in homes and businesses, via Internet and Intranet services, there is an urgent need for technologies and tools to process the relevant information. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an Information Extraction task that has become an integral part of many other Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as Machine Translation and Information Retrieval. Arabic NER has begun to receive attention in recent years. The characteristics and peculiarities of Arabic, a member of the Semitic languages family, make dealing with NER a challenge. The performance of an Arabic NER component affects the overall performance of the NLP system in a positive manner. This article attempts to describe and detail the recent increase in interest and progress made in Arabic NER research. The importance of the NER task is demonstrated, the main characteristics of the Arabic language are highlighted, and the aspects of standardization in annotating named entities are illustrated. Moreover, the different Arabic linguistic resources are presented and the approaches used in Arabic NER field are explained. The features of common tools used in Arabic NER are described, and standard evaluation metrics are illustrated. In addition, a review of the state of the art of Arabic NER research is discussed. Finally, we present our conclusions. Throughout the presentation, illustrative examples are used for clarification.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Husni Teja Sukmana ◽  
JM Muslimin ◽  
Asep Fajar Firmansyah ◽  
Lee Kyung Oh

In Indonesia, philanthropy is identical to Zakat. Zakat belongs to a specific domain because it has its characteristics of knowledge. This research studied knowledge graph in the Zakat domain called KGZ which is conducted in Indonesia. This area is still rarely performed, thus it becomes the first knowledge graph for Zakat in Indonesia. It is designed to provide basic knowledge on Zakat and managing the Zakat in Indonesia. There are some issues with building KGZ, firstly, the existing Indonesian named entity recognition (NER) is non-restricted and general-purpose based which data is obtained from a general source like news. Second, there is no dataset for NER in the Zakat domain. We define four steps to build KGZ, involving data acquisition, extracting entities and their relationship, mapping to ontology, and deploying knowledge graphs and visualizations. This research contributed a knowledge graph for Zakat (KGZ) and a building NER model for Zakat, called KGZ-NER. We defined 17 new named entity classes related to Zakat with 272 entities, 169 relationships and provided labelled datasets for KGZ-NER that are publicly accessible. We applied the Indonesian-Open Domain Information Extractor framework to process identifying entities’ relationships. Then designed modeling of information using resources description framework (RDF) to build the knowledge base for KGZ and store it to GraphDB, a product from Ontotext. This NER model has a precision 0.7641, recall 0.4544, and F1-score 0.5655. The increasing data size of KGZ is required to discover all of the knowledge of Zakat and managing Zakat in Indonesia. Moreover, sufficient resources are required in future works.


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