UtahBMI at SemEval-2016 task 12: Extracting temporal information from clinical text

Abstract

The 2016 Clinical TempEval continued the 2015 shared task on temporal information extraction with a new evaluation test set. Our team, UtahBMI, participated in all subtasks using machine learning approaches with ClearTK (LIBLINEAR), CRF++ and CRF-suite packages. Our experiments show that CRF-based classifiers yield, in general, higher recall for multi-word spans, while SVM-based classifiers are better at predicting correct attributes of TIMEX3. In addition, we show that an ensemble-based approach for TIMEX3 could yield improved results. Our team achieved competitive results in each subtask with an F1 75.4% for TIMEX3, F1 89.2% for EVENT, F1 84.4% for event relations with document time (DocTimeRel), and F1 51.1% for narrative container (CONTAINS) relations.