Structured prediction models for RNN based sequence labeling in clinical text

Abhyuday Jagannatha1 and hong yu2
1College of Information and Computer Sciences , UMass AMherst, 2University of Massachusetts Medical School


Abstract

Sequence labeling is a widely used method for named entity recognition and information extraction from unstructured natural language data. In the clinical domain one major application of sequence labeling involves extraction of relevant entities such as medication, indication, and side-effects from Electronic Health Record Narratives. Sequence labeling in this domain presents its own set of challenges and objectives. In this work we experiment with Conditional Random Field based structured learning models with Recurrent Neural Networks. We extend the previously studied CRF-LSTM model with explicit modeling of pairwise potentials. We also propose an approximate version of skip-chain CRF inference with RNN potentials. We use these methods for structured prediction in order to improve the exact phrase detection of clinical entities.