Shallow features for differentiating disease-treatment relations using supervised learning a pilot study

Abstract

Clinical narratives provide an information rich, nearly unexplored corpus of evidential knowledge that is considered as a challenge for practitioners in the language technology field, particularly because of the nature of the texts (excessive use of terminology, abbreviations, orthographic term variation), the significant opportunities for clinical research that such material can provide and the potentially broad impact that clinical findings may have in every day life. It is therefore recognized that the capability to automatically extract key concepts and their relationships from such data will allow systems to properly understand the content and knowledge embedded in the free text which can be of great value for applications such as information extraction and question & answering. This paper gives a brief presentation of such textual data and its semantic annotation, and discusses the set of semantic relations that can be observed between diseases and treatments in the sample. The problem is then designed as a supervised machine learning task in which the relations are tried to be learned using pre-annotated data. The challenges designing the problem and empirical results are presented. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.