Effective co-reference resolution in clinical text

Abstract

The 2011 I2B2 challenge involves co-reference resolution in medical documents. Concept mentions have been annotated in clinical texts, and the mentions which co-refer in each document are to be linked by co-reference chains. There have been systems developed for co-reference resolution by various organizations. The aim of this study was to use the systems which are publicly available, as well as build a rule based algorithm tailored for this challenge, and test these systems on the data provided for this challenge. The study shows the publically available systems do manage to find some of the co-referent links, and the rule based system developed for this challenge performs well finding the majority of the co-referent links. The system that was used to provide the final outputs for the challenge had 89.6% overall performance average. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.