Extractive Medical Entity Disambiguation with Memory Mechanism and Memorized Entity Information

Guobiao Zhang, Xueping Peng, Tao Shen, Guodong Long, Jiasheng Si, Libo Qin, Wenpeng Lu


Abstract
Medical entity disambiguation (MED) aims to ground medical mentions in text with ontological entities in knowledge bases (KBs). A notable challenge of MED is the long medical text usually contains multiple entities’ mentions with intricate correlations. However, limited by computation overhead, many existing methods consider only a single candidate entity mention during the disambiguation process. As such, they focus only on local MED optimal while ignoring the sole-mention disambiguation possibly boosted by richer context from other mentions’ disambiguating processes – missing global optimal on entity combination in the text. Motivated by this, we propose a new approach called Extractive Medical Entity Disambiguation with Memory Mechanism and Memorized Entity Information (M3E). Specifically, we reformulate MED as a text extraction task, which simultaneously accepts the context of medical mentions, all possible candidate entities, and entity definitions, and it is then trained to extract the text span corresponding to the correct entity. Upon our new formulation, 1) to alleviate the computation overhead from the enriched context, we devise a memory mechanism module that performs memory caching, retrieval, fusion and cross-network residual; and 2) to utilize the disambiguation clues from other mentions, we design an auxiliary disambiguation module that employs a gating mechanism to assist the disambiguation of remaining mentions. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of M3E over the state-of-the-art MED methods on all metrics.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.810
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13811–13822
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.810
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Guobiao Zhang, Xueping Peng, Tao Shen, Guodong Long, Jiasheng Si, Libo Qin, and Wenpeng Lu. 2024. Extractive Medical Entity Disambiguation with Memory Mechanism and Memorized Entity Information. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 13811–13822, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Extractive Medical Entity Disambiguation with Memory Mechanism and Memorized Entity Information (Zhang et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.810.pdf