Exploring Disorder-Aware Attention for Clinical Event Extraction

Abstract

Event extraction is one of the crucial tasks in biomedical text mining that aims to extract specific information concerning incidents embedded in the texts. In this article, we propose a deep learning framework that aims to identify the attributes (severity, course, temporal expression, and document creation time) associated with the medical concepts extracted from electronic medical records. The bi-directional long short-term memory network assisted by the attention mechanism is utilized to uncover the important aspects of the patient’s medical conditions. The attention mechanism specific to the medical disorder mention can focus on various parts of the sentence when different disorders are considered as input. The proposed methodology is evaluated on benchmark ShARe/CLEF eHealth Evaluation Lab 2014 shared task 2 datasets. In addition to the CLEF dataset, we also used the social media text, especially the medical blog posts. Experimental results of the proposed approach illustrate that our proposed approach achieves significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art techniques and the highly competitive deep learning--based baseline methods.