Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Clinical Named Entity Recognition

Abstract

We propose a transfer learning method that adapts a high-resource English clinical NER model to low-resource languages and domains using only small amounts of in-domain annotated data. Our approach involves translating in-domain datasets to English, fine-tuning the English model on the translated data, and then transferring it to the target language/domain. Experiments on Spanish, French, and conversational clinical text datasets show accuracy gains over models trained on target data alone. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and can enable clinical NLP in more languages and modalities with limited resources.