Self-Supervised Detection of Contextual Synonyms in a Multi-Class Setting: Phenotype Annotation Use Case

Jingqing Zhang, Luis Bolanos Trujillo, Tong Li, Ashwani Tanwar, Guilherme Freire, Xian Yang, Julia Ive, Vibhor Gupta, Yike Guo


Abstract
Contextualised word embeddings is a powerful tool to detect contextual synonyms. However, most of the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning concept extraction methods remain supervised and underexploit the potential of the context. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised pre-training approach which is able to detect contextual synonyms of concepts being training on the data created by shallow matching. We apply our methodology in the sparse multi-class setting (over 15,000 concepts) to extract phenotype information from electronic health records. We further investigate data augmentation techniques to address the problem of the class sparsity. Our approach achieves a new SOTA for the unsupervised phenotype concept annotation on clinical text on F1 and Recall outperforming the previous SOTA with a gain of up to 4.5 and 4.0 absolute points, respectively. After fine-tuning with as little as 20% of the labelled data, we also outperform BioBERT and ClinicalBERT. The extrinsic evaluation on three ICU benchmarks also shows the benefit of using the phenotypes annotated by our model as features.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.690
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8754–8769
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.690
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.690
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jingqing Zhang, Luis Bolanos Trujillo, Tong Li, Ashwani Tanwar, Guilherme Freire, Xian Yang, Julia Ive, Vibhor Gupta, and Yike Guo. 2021. Self-Supervised Detection of Contextual Synonyms in a Multi-Class Setting: Phenotype Annotation Use Case. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8754–8769, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Self-Supervised Detection of Contextual Synonyms in a Multi-Class Setting: Phenotype Annotation Use Case (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.690.pdf
Video:
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