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

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

Shufeng Xiong¹  Ming Cheng²  Jianbo Gao³  Pan Liang³  Fei Li⁴ 

[1] Colleges of Information and Management Science, Henan Agricultural University, Zhengzhou, China;Department of Medical Information, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China;Department of Radiology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China;School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China;

关键词: Chinese clinical named entity recognition;    Multi-task learning;    Deep neural network;    Dictionary features;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12911-021-01717-1

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundNamed 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.MethodsTo 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.ResultsIn 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.ConclusionsThe comparison results of different models demonstrated the effectiveness of our model. The proposed model outperformed traditional statistical models.

【 授权许可】

CC BY