Leveraging Dependency Forest for Neural Medical Relation Extraction

Linfeng Song, Yue Zhang, Daniel Gildea, Mo Yu, Zhiguo Wang, Jinsong Su


Abstract
Medical relation extraction discovers relations between entity mentions in text, such as research articles. For this task, dependency syntax has been recognized as a crucial source of features. Yet in the medical domain, 1-best parse trees suffer from relatively low accuracies, diminishing their usefulness. We investigate a method to alleviate this problem by utilizing dependency forests. Forests contain more than one possible decisions and therefore have higher recall but more noise compared with 1-best outputs. A graph neural network is used to represent the forests, automatically distinguishing the useful syntactic information from parsing noise. Results on two benchmarks show that our method outperforms the standard tree-based methods, giving the state-of-the-art results in the literature.
Anthology ID:
D19-1020
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
208–218
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1020
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1020
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Linfeng Song, Yue Zhang, Daniel Gildea, Mo Yu, Zhiguo Wang, and Jinsong Su. 2019. Leveraging Dependency Forest for Neural Medical Relation Extraction. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 208–218, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging Dependency Forest for Neural Medical Relation Extraction (Song et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1020.pdf
Code
 freesunshine0316/dep-forest-re
Data
SemEval-2010 Task-8