Retrofitting Word Embeddings with the UMLS Metathesaurus for Clinical Information Extraction

Conference · Sat Dec 01 00:00:00 EST 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData.2018.8621999· OSTI ID:1491322

Alawad, Mohammed  ^[1]; Hasan, S M Shamimul ^[1]; Christian, Blair  ^[1]; Tourassi, Georgia  ^[1]

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1. ORNL

Deep learning has surged in popularity and proven to be effective for various artificial intelligence appli- cations including information extraction from cancer pathol- ogy reports. Since word representation is a core unit that enables deep learning algorithms to understand words and be able to perform NLP, this representation must include as much information as possible to help these algorithms achieve high classification performance. Therefore, in this work in addition to the distributional information of words in large sized corpora, we use UMLS vocabulary resources to enrich the vector space representation of words with the semantic relations between words. These resources provide many terminologies pertaining to cancer. The refined word embeddings are used with a convolutional neural (CNN) model to extract four data elements from cancer pathology reports; ICD-O-3 tumor topography codes, tumor laterality, behavior, and histological grade. We observed that using UMLS vocabulary resources to enrich word embeddings of CNN models consistently outperformed CNN models without pre- training word embeddings and even with pre-trained word embeddings on a domain specific corpus across all four tasks. The results show marginal improvement on the laterality task, but a significant improvement on the other tasks, especially for the macro-f score. Specifically, the improvements are 3%, 13%, and 15% for tumor site, histological grade, and behavior tasks, respectively. This approach is encouraging to enrich word embeddings with more clinical data resources to be used for information abstraction tasks from clinical pathology reports.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1491322
• Resource Relation: Conference: IEEE International Conference on Big Data - Seatttle, Washington, United States of America - 12/10/2018 10:00:00 AM-12/13/2018 10:00:00 AM
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English