A Comprehensive Evaluation of Biomedical Entity Linking Models

David Kartchner, Jennifer Deng, Shubham Lohiya, Tejasri Kopparthi, Prasanth Bathala, Daniel Domingo-Fernández, Cassie Mitchell


Abstract
Biomedical entity linking (BioEL) is the process of connecting entities referenced in documents to entries in biomedical databases such as the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) or Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). The study objective was to comprehensively evaluate nine recent state-of-the-art biomedical entity linking models under a unified framework. We compare these models along axes of (1) accuracy, (2) speed, (3) ease of use, (4) generalization, and (5) adaptability to new ontologies and datasets. We additionally quantify the impact of various preprocessing choices such as abbreviation detection. Systematic evaluation reveals several notable gaps in current methods. In particular, current methods struggle to correctly link genes and proteins and often have difficulty effectively incorporating context into linking decisions. To expedite future development and baseline testing, we release our unified evaluation framework and all included models on GitHub at https://github.com/davidkartchner/biomedical-entity-linking
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.893
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14462–14478
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.893
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.893
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
David Kartchner, Jennifer Deng, Shubham Lohiya, Tejasri Kopparthi, Prasanth Bathala, Daniel Domingo-Fernández, and Cassie Mitchell. 2023. A Comprehensive Evaluation of Biomedical Entity Linking Models. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 14462–14478, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Comprehensive Evaluation of Biomedical Entity Linking Models (Kartchner et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.893.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.893.mp4