Investigating the Challenges of Temporal Relation Extraction from Clinical Text

Diana Galvan, Naoaki Okazaki, Koji Matsuda, Kentaro Inui


Abstract
Temporal reasoning remains as an unsolved task for Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly demonstrated in the clinical domain. The complexity of temporal representation in language is evident as results of the 2016 Clinical TempEval challenge indicate: the current state-of-the-art systems perform well in solving mention-identification tasks of event and time expressions but poorly in temporal relation extraction, showing a gap of around 0.25 point below human performance. We explore to adapt the tree-based LSTM-RNN model proposed by Miwa and Bansal (2016) to temporal relation extraction from clinical text, obtaining a five point improvement over the best 2016 Clinical TempEval system and two points over the state-of-the-art. We deliver a deep analysis of the results and discuss the next step towards human-like temporal reasoning.
Anthology ID:
W18-5607
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis
Month:
October
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Alberto Lavelli, Anne-Lyse Minard, Fabio Rinaldi
Venue:
Louhi
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
55–64
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-5607
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-5607
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Diana Galvan, Naoaki Okazaki, Koji Matsuda, and Kentaro Inui. 2018. Investigating the Challenges of Temporal Relation Extraction from Clinical Text. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis, pages 55–64, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Investigating the Challenges of Temporal Relation Extraction from Clinical Text (Galvan et al., Louhi 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-5607.pdf