Embedding Strategies for Specialized Domains: Application to Clinical Entity Recognition

Hicham El Boukkouri, Olivier Ferret, Thomas Lavergne, Pierre Zweigenbaum


Abstract
Using pre-trained word embeddings in conjunction with Deep Learning models has become the “de facto” approach in Natural Language Processing (NLP). While this usually yields satisfactory results, off-the-shelf word embeddings tend to perform poorly on texts from specialized domains such as clinical reports. Moreover, training specialized word representations from scratch is often either impossible or ineffective due to the lack of large enough in-domain data. In this work, we focus on the clinical domain for which we study embedding strategies that rely on general-domain resources only. We show that by combining off-the-shelf contextual embeddings (ELMo) with static word2vec embeddings trained on a small in-domain corpus built from the task data, we manage to reach and sometimes outperform representations learned from a large corpus in the medical domain.
Anthology ID:
P19-2041
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Fernando Alva-Manchego, Eunsol Choi, Daniel Khashabi
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
295–301
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-2041
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-2041
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hicham El Boukkouri, Olivier Ferret, Thomas Lavergne, and Pierre Zweigenbaum. 2019. Embedding Strategies for Specialized Domains: Application to Clinical Entity Recognition. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, pages 295–301, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Embedding Strategies for Specialized Domains: Application to Clinical Entity Recognition (El Boukkouri et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-2041.pdf
Data
2010 i2b2/VAMIMIC-III