BioBERTpt - A Portuguese Neural Language Model for Clinical Named Entity Recognition

Elisa Terumi Rubel Schneider, João Vitor Andrioli de Souza, Julien Knafou, Lucas Emanuel Silva e Oliveira, Jenny Copara, Yohan Bonescki Gumiel, Lucas Ferro Antunes de Oliveira, Emerson Cabrera Paraiso, Douglas Teodoro, Cláudia Maria Cabral Moro Barra


Abstract
With the growing number of electronic health record data, clinical NLP tasks have become increasingly relevant to unlock valuable information from unstructured clinical text. Although the performance of downstream NLP tasks, such as named-entity recognition (NER), in English corpus has recently improved by contextualised language models, less research is available for clinical texts in low resource languages. Our goal is to assess a deep contextual embedding model for Portuguese, so called BioBERTpt, to support clinical and biomedical NER. We transfer learned information encoded in a multilingual-BERT model to a corpora of clinical narratives and biomedical-scientific papers in Brazilian Portuguese. To evaluate the performance of BioBERTpt, we ran NER experiments on two annotated corpora containing clinical narratives and compared the results with existing BERT models. Our in-domain model outperformed the baseline model in F1-score by 2.72%, achieving higher performance in 11 out of 13 assessed entities. We demonstrate that enriching contextual embedding models with domain literature can play an important role in improving performance for specific NLP tasks. The transfer learning process enhanced the Portuguese biomedical NER model by reducing the necessity of labeled data and the demand for retraining a whole new model.
Anthology ID:
2020.clinicalnlp-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Anna Rumshisky, Kirk Roberts, Steven Bethard, Tristan Naumann
Venue:
ClinicalNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
65–72
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.clinicalnlp-1.7
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.clinicalnlp-1.7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elisa Terumi Rubel Schneider, João Vitor Andrioli de Souza, Julien Knafou, Lucas Emanuel Silva e Oliveira, Jenny Copara, Yohan Bonescki Gumiel, Lucas Ferro Antunes de Oliveira, Emerson Cabrera Paraiso, Douglas Teodoro, and Cláudia Maria Cabral Moro Barra. 2020. BioBERTpt - A Portuguese Neural Language Model for Clinical Named Entity Recognition. In Proceedings of the 3rd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 65–72, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BioBERTpt - A Portuguese Neural Language Model for Clinical Named Entity Recognition (Schneider et al., ClinicalNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.clinicalnlp-1.7.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939829
Data
SemClinBr