Dilated Convolutional Attention Network for Medical Code Assignment from Clinical Text

Shaoxiong Ji, Erik Cambria, Pekka Marttinen


Abstract
Medical code assignment, which predicts medical codes from clinical texts, is a fundamental task of intelligent medical information systems. The emergence of deep models in natural language processing has boosted the development of automatic assignment methods. However, recent advanced neural architectures with flat convolutions or multi-channel feature concatenation ignore the sequential causal constraint within a text sequence and may not learn meaningful clinical text representations, especially for lengthy clinical notes with long-term sequential dependency. This paper proposes a Dilated Convolutional Attention Network (DCAN), integrating dilated convolutions, residual connections, and label attention, for medical code assignment. It adopts dilated convolutions to capture complex medical patterns with a receptive field which increases exponentially with dilation size. Experiments on a real-world clinical dataset empirically show that our model improves the state of the art.
Anthology ID:
2020.clinicalnlp-1.8
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:
73–78
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.clinicalnlp-1.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.clinicalnlp-1.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shaoxiong Ji, Erik Cambria, and Pekka Marttinen. 2020. Dilated Convolutional Attention Network for Medical Code Assignment from Clinical Text. In Proceedings of the 3rd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 73–78, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dilated Convolutional Attention Network for Medical Code Assignment from Clinical Text (Ji et al., ClinicalNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.clinicalnlp-1.8.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939807
Data
MIMIC-III