With the growing number of electronic health record data, clinical NLP tasks have become increasingly relevant to unlock valuable information from unstructured clinical text. Although the performance of downstream NLP tasks, such as named-entity recognition (NER), in English corpus has recently improved by contextualised language models, less research is available for clinical texts in low resource languages. Our goal is to assess a deep contextual embedding model for Portuguese, so called BioBERTpt, to support clinical and biomedical NER. We transfer learned information encoded in a multilingual-BERT model to a corpora of clinical narratives and biomedical-scientific papers in Brazilian Portuguese. To evaluate the performance of BioBERTpt, we ran NER experiments on two annotated corpora containing clinical narratives and compared the results with existing BERT models. Our in-domain model outperformed the baseline model in F1-score by 2.72%, achieving higher performance in 11 out of 13 assessed entities. We demonstrate that enriching contextual embedding models with domain literature can play an important role in improving performance for specific NLP tasks. The transfer learning process enhanced the Portuguese biomedical NER model by reducing the necessity of labeled data and the demand for retraining a whole new model.

Recent improvements in machine-reading technologies attracted much attention to automation problems and their possibilities. In this context, WNUT 2020 introduces a Name Entity Recognition (NER) task based on wet laboratory procedures. In this paper, we present a 3-step method based on deep neural language models that reported the best overall exact match F1-score (77.99%) of the competition. By fine-tuning 10 times, 10 different pretrained language models, this work shows the advantage of having more models in an ensemble based on a majority of votes strategy. On top of that, having 100 different models allowed us to analyse the combinations of ensemble that demonstrated the impact of having multiple pretrained models versus fine-tuning a pretrained model multiple times.

Named entity recognition (NER) is key for biomedical applications as it allows knowledge discovery in free text data. As entities are semantic phrases, their meaning is conditioned to the context to avoid ambiguity. In this work, we explore contextualized language models for NER in French biomedical text as part of the Défi Fouille de Textes challenge. Our best approach achieved an F1 -measure of 66% for symptoms and signs, and pathology categories, being top 1 for subtask 1. For anatomy, dose, exam, mode, moment, substance, treatment, and value categories, it achieved an F1 -measure of 75% (subtask 2). If considered all categories, our model achieved the best result in the challenge, with an F1 -measure of 72%. The use of an ensemble of neural language models proved to be very effective, improving a CRF baseline by up to 28% and a single specialised language model by 4%.