Deep Learning for Punctuation Restoration in Medical Reports

Wael Salloum, Greg Finley, Erik Edwards, Mark Miller, David Suendermann-Oeft


Abstract
In clinical dictation, speakers try to be as concise as possible to save time, often resulting in utterances without explicit punctuation commands. Since the end product of a dictated report, e.g. an out-patient letter, does require correct orthography, including exact punctuation, the latter need to be restored, preferably by automated means. This paper describes a method for punctuation restoration based on a state-of-the-art stack of NLP and machine learning techniques including B-RNNs with an attention mechanism and late fusion, as well as a feature extraction technique tailored to the processing of medical terminology using a novel vocabulary reduction model. To the best of our knowledge, the resulting performance is superior to that reported in prior art on similar tasks.
Anthology ID:
W17-2319
Volume:
BioNLP 2017
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada,
Editors:
Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, Dina Demner-Fushman, Sophia Ananiadou, Junichi Tsujii
Venue:
BioNLP
SIG:
SIGBIOMED
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
159–164
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2319
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-2319
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wael Salloum, Greg Finley, Erik Edwards, Mark Miller, and David Suendermann-Oeft. 2017. Deep Learning for Punctuation Restoration in Medical Reports. In BioNLP 2017, pages 159–164, Vancouver, Canada,. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Deep Learning for Punctuation Restoration in Medical Reports (Salloum et al., BioNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2319.pdf