Learning Entity-Likeness with Multiple Approximate Matches for Biomedical NER

Abstract

Biomedical Named Entities are complex, so approximate matching has been used to improve entity coverage. However, the usual approximate matching approach fetches only one matching result, which is often noisy. In this work, we propose a method for biomedical NER that fetches multiple approximate matches for a given phrase to leverage their variations to estimate entity-likeness. The model uses pooling to discard the unnecessary information from the noisy matching results, and learn the entity-likeness of the phrase with multiple approximate matches. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets from the biomedical domain, BC2GM, NCBI-disease, and BC4CHEMD, demonstrate the effectiveness. Our model improves the average F-measures by up to 0.21 percentage points compared to a BioBERT-based NER.