Frame Semantic Patterns for Identifying Underreporting of Notifiable Events in Healthcare: The Case of Gender-Based Violence

Lívia Dutra, Arthur Lorenzi, Lais Berno, Franciany Campos, Karoline Biscardi, Kenneth Brown, Marcelo Viridiano, Frederico Belcavello, Ely E. Matos, Olivia Guaranha, Erik Santos, Sofia Reinach, Tiago Timponi Torrent


Abstract
We introduce a methodology for the identification of notifiable events in the domain of healthcare. The methodology harnesses semantic frames to define fine-grained patterns and search them in unstructured data, namely, open-text fields in e-medical records. We apply the methodology to the problem of underreporting of gender-based violence (GBV) in e-medical records produced during patients’ visits to primary care units. A total of eight patterns are defined and searched on a corpus of 21 million sentences in Brazilian Portuguese extracted from e-SUS APS. The results are manually evaluated by linguists and the precision of each pattern measured. Our findings reveal that the methodology effectively identifies reports of violence with a precision of 0.726, confirming its robustness. Designed as a transparent, efficient, low-carbon, and language-agnostic pipeline, the approach can be easily adapted to other health surveillance contexts, contributing to the broader, ethical, and explainable use of NLP in public health systems.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.51
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
694–704
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-051
DOI:
10.63317/47vpwbo6vbxc
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lívia Dutra, Arthur Lorenzi, Lais Berno, Franciany Campos, Karoline Biscardi, Kenneth Brown, Marcelo Viridiano, Frederico Belcavello, Ely E. Matos, Olivia Guaranha, Erik Santos, Sofia Reinach, and Tiago Timponi Torrent. 2026. Frame Semantic Patterns for Identifying Underreporting of Notifiable Events in Healthcare: The Case of Gender-Based Violence. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 694–704, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Frame Semantic Patterns for Identifying Underreporting of Notifiable Events in Healthcare: The Case of Gender-Based Violence (Dutra et al., LREC 2026)
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