Syntactic parsing of clinical text: Guideline and corpus development with handling ill-formed sentences

Jung wei Fan, Elly W. Yang, Min Jiang, Rashmi Prasad, Richard M. Loomis, Daniel S. Zisook, Josh C. Denny, Hua Xu, Yang Huang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

Objective: To develop, evaluate, and share: (1) syntactic parsing guidelines for clinical text, with a new approach to handling ill-formed sentences; and (2) a clinical Treebank annotated according to the guidelines. To document the process and findings for readers with similar interest. Methods: Using random samples from a shared natural language processing challenge dataset, we developed a handbook of domain-customized syntactic parsing guidelines based on iterative annotation and adjudication between two institutions. Special considerations were incorporated into the guidelines for handling ill-formed sentences, which are common in clinical text. Intra- and inter-annotator agreement rates were used to evaluate consistency in following the guidelines. Quantitative and qualitative properties of the annotated Treebank, as well as its use to retrain a statistical parser, were reported. Results: A supplement to the Penn Treebank II guidelines was developed for annotating clinical sentences. After three iterations of annotation and adjudication on 450 sentences, the annotators reached an F-measure agreement rate of 0.930 (while intraannotator rate was 0.948) on a final independent set. A total of 1100 sentences from progress notes were annotated that demonstrated domain-specific linguistic features. A statistical parser retrained with combined general English (mainly news text) annotations and our annotations achieved an accuracy of 0.811 (higher than models trained purely with either general or clinical sentences alone). Both the guidelines and syntactic annotations are made available at https://sourceforge. net/projects/medicaltreebank. Conclusions: We developed guidelines for parsing clinical text and annotated a corpus accordingly. The high intra- and inter-annotator agreement rates showed decent consistency in following the guidelines. The corpus was shown to be useful in retraining a statistical parser that achieved moderate accuracy.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1168-1177
Number of pages10
JournalJournal of the American Medical Informatics Association
Volume20
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Health Informatics

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