1. |
- Täckström, Oscar, et al.
(author)
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Uncertainty Detection as Approximate Max-Margin Sequence Labelling
- 2010
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In: CoNLL 2010. - : Association for Computational Linguistics. ; , s. 84-91
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper reports experiments for the CoNLL 2010 shared task on learning to detect hedges and their scope in natural language text. We have addressed the experimental tasks as supervised linear maximum margin prediction problems. For sentence level hedge detection in the biological domain we use an L1-regularised binary support vector machine, while for sentence level weasel detection in the Wikipedia domain, we use an L2-regularised approach. We model the in-sentence uncertainty cue and scope detection task as an L2-regularised approximate maximum margin sequence labelling problem, using the BIO-encoding. In addition to surface level features, we use a variety of linguistic features based on a functional dependency analysis. A greedy forward selection strategy is used in exploring the large set of potential features. Our official results for Task 1 for the biological domain are 85.2 F1-score, for the Wikipedia set 55.4 F1-score. For Task 2, our official results are 2.1 for the entire task with a score of 62.5 for cue detection. After resolving errors and final bugs, our final results are for Task 1, biological: 86.0, Wikipedia: 58.2; Task 2, scopes: 39.6 and cues: 78.5.
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2. |
- Dziadek, Juliusz, et al.
(author)
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Improving Terminology Mapping in Clinical Text with Context-Sensitive Spelling Correction
- 2017
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In: Informatics for Health. - : IOS Press. - 9781614997528 - 9781614997535 ; , s. 241-245
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The mapping of unstructured clinical text to an ontology facilitates meaningful secondary use of health records but is non-trivial due to lexical variation and the abundance of misspellings in hurriedly produced notes. Here, we apply several spelling correction methods to Swedish medical text and evaluate their impact on SNOMED CT mapping; first in a controlled evaluation using medical literature text with induced errors, followed by a partial evaluation on clinical notes. It is shown that the best-performing method is context-sensitive, taking into account trigram frequencies and utilizing a corpus-based dictionary.
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3. |
- Henriksson, Aron, et al.
(author)
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Corpus-Driven Terminology Development : Populating Swedish SNOMED CT with Synonyms Extracted from Electronic Health Records
- 2013
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In: Proceedings of the 2013 Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP 2013). - : Association for Computational Linguistics. - 9781937284541 ; , s. 36-44
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The various ways in which one can refer to the same clinical concept needs to be accounted for in a semantic resource such as SNOMED CT. Developing terminological resources manually is, however, prohibitively expensive and likely to result in low coverage, especially given the high variability of language use in clinical text. To support this process, distributional methods can be employed in conjunction with a large corpus of electronic health records to extract synonym candidates for clinical terms. In this paper, we exemplify the potential of our proposed method using the Swedish version of SNOMED CT, which currently lacks synonyms. A medical expert inspects two thousand term pairs generated by two semantic spaces -- one of which models multiword terms in addition to single words -- for one hundred preferred terms of the semantic types disorder and finding.
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4. |
- Henriksson, Aron, 1985-
(author)
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Ensembles of Semantic Spaces : On Combining Models of Distributional Semantics with Applications in Healthcare
- 2015
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Distributional semantics allows models of linguistic meaning to be derived from observations of language use in large amounts of text. By modeling the meaning of words in semantic (vector) space on the basis of co-occurrence information, distributional semantics permits a quantitative interpretation of (relative) word meaning in an unsupervised setting, i.e., human annotations are not required. The ability to obtain inexpensive word representations in this manner helps to alleviate the bottleneck of fully supervised approaches to natural language processing, especially since models of distributional semantics are data-driven and hence agnostic to both language and domain.All that is required to obtain distributed word representations is a sizeable corpus; however, the composition of the semantic space is not only affected by the underlying data but also by certain model hyperparameters. While these can be optimized for a specific downstream task, there are currently limitations to the extent the many aspects of semantics can be captured in a single model. This dissertation investigates the possibility of capturing multiple aspects of lexical semantics by adopting the ensemble methodology within a distributional semantic framework to create ensembles of semantic spaces. To that end, various strategies for creating the constituent semantic spaces, as well as for combining them, are explored in a number of studies.The notion of semantic space ensembles is generalizable across languages and domains; however, the use of unsupervised methods is particularly valuable in low-resource settings, in particular when annotated corpora are scarce, as in the domain of Swedish healthcare. The semantic space ensembles are here empirically evaluated for tasks that have promising applications in healthcare. It is shown that semantic space ensembles – created by exploiting various corpora and data types, as well as by adjusting model hyperparameters such as the size of the context window and the strategy for handling word order within the context window – are able to outperform the use of any single constituent model on a range of tasks. The semantic space ensembles are used both directly for k-nearest neighbors retrieval and for semi-supervised machine learning. Applying semantic space ensembles to important medical problems facilitates the secondary use of healthcare data, which, despite its abundance and transformative potential, is grossly underutilized.
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5. |
- Henriksson, Aron, et al.
(author)
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Identifying adverse drug event information in clinical notes with distributional semantic representations of context
- 2015
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In: Journal of Biomedical Informatics. - : Elsevier BV. - 1532-0464 .- 1532-0480. ; 57, s. 333-349
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- For the purpose of post-marketing drug safety surveillance, which has traditionally relied on the volun- tary reporting of individual cases of adverse drug events (ADEs), other sources of information are now being explored, including electronic health records (EHRs), which give us access to enormous amounts of longitudinal observations of the treatment of patients and their drug use. Adverse drug events, which can be encoded in EHRs with certain diagnosis codes, are, however, heavily underreported. It is therefore important to develop capabilities to process, by means of computational methods, the more unstructured EHR data in the form of clinical notes, where clinicians may describe and reason around suspected ADEs. In this study, we report on the creation of an annotated corpus of Swedish health records for the purpose of learning to identify information pertaining to ADEs present in clinical notes. To this end, three key tasks are tackled: recognizing relevant named entities (disorders, symptoms, drugs), labeling attributes of the recognized entities (negation, speculation, temporality), and relationships between them (indication, adverse drug event). For each of the three tasks, leveraging models of distributional semantics – i.e., unsupervised methods that exploit co-occurrence information to model, typically in vector space, the meaning of words – and, in particular, combinations of such models, is shown to improve the predictive performance. The ability to make use of such unsupervised methods is critical when faced with large amounts of sparse and high-dimensional data, especially in domains where annotated resources are scarce.
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6. |
- Henriksson, Aron, et al.
(author)
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Identifying Synonymy between SNOMED Clinical Terms of Varying Length Using Distributional Analysis of Electronic Health Records
- 2013
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In: AMIA Conference Proceedings Archive. - : American Medical Informatics Association. ; , s. 600-609
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Medical terminologies and ontologies are important tools for natural language processing of health record narratives. To account for the variability of language use, synonyms need to be stored in a semantic resource as textual instantiations of a concept. Developing such resources manually is, however, prohibitively expensive and likely to result in low coverage. To facilitate and expedite the process of lexical resource development, distributional analysis of large corpora provides a powerful data-driven means of (semi-)automatically identifying semantic relations, including synonymy, between terms. In this paper, we demonstrate how distributional analysis of a large corpus of electronic health records – the MIMIC-II database – can be employed to extract synonyms of SNOMED CT preferred terms. A distinctive feature of our method is its ability to identify synonymous relations between terms of varying length.
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7. |
- Henriksson, Aron, 1985-
(author)
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Semantic Spaces of Clinical Text : Leveraging Distributional Semantics for Natural Language Processing of Electronic Health Records
- 2013
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The large amounts of clinical data generated by electronic health record systems are an underutilized resource, which, if tapped, has enormous potential to improve health care. Since the majority of this data is in the form of unstructured text, which is challenging to analyze computationally, there is a need for sophisticated clinical language processing methods. Unsupervised methods that exploit statistical properties of the data are particularly valuable due to the limited availability of annotated corpora in the clinical domain.Information extraction and natural language processing systems need to incorporate some knowledge of semantics. One approach exploits the distributional properties of language – more specifically, term co-occurrence information – to model the relative meaning of terms in high-dimensional vector space. Such methods have been used with success in a number of general language processing tasks; however, their application in the clinical domain has previously only been explored to a limited extent. By applying models of distributional semantics to clinical text, semantic spaces can be constructed in a completely unsupervised fashion. Semantic spaces of clinical text can then be utilized in a number of medically relevant applications.The application of distributional semantics in the clinical domain is here demonstrated in three use cases: (1) synonym extraction of medical terms, (2) assignment of diagnosis codes and (3) identification of adverse drug reactions. To apply distributional semantics effectively to a wide range of both general and, in particular, clinical language processing tasks, certain limitations or challenges need to be addressed, such as how to model the meaning of multiword terms and account for the function of negation: a simple means of incorporating paraphrasing and negation in a distributional semantic framework is here proposed and evaluated. The notion of ensembles of semantic spaces is also introduced; these are shown to outperform the use of a single semantic space on the synonym extraction task. This idea allows different models of distributional semantics, with different parameter configurations and induced from different corpora, to be combined. This is not least important in the clinical domain, as it allows potentially limited amounts of clinical data to be supplemented with data from other, more readily available sources. The importance of configuring the dimensionality of semantic spaces, particularly when – as is typically the case in the clinical domain – the vocabulary grows large, is also demonstrated.
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8. |
- Henriksson, Aron, et al.
(author)
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Synonym extraction and abbreviation expansion with ensembles of semantic spaces
- 2014
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In: Journal of Biomedical Semantics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2041-1480. ; 5:6
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Background: Terminologies that account for variation in language use by linking synonyms and abbreviations to their corresponding concept are important enablers of high-quality information extraction from medical texts. Due to the use of specialized sub-languages in the medical domain, manual construction of semantic resources that accurately reflect language use is both costly and challenging, often resulting in low coverage. Although models of distributional semantics applied to large corpora provide a potential means of supporting development of such resources, their ability to isolate synonymy from other semantic relations is limited. Their application in the clinical domain has also only recently begun to be explored. Combining distributional models and applying them to different types of corpora may lead to enhanced performance on the tasks of automatically extracting synonyms and abbreviation-expansion pairs. Results: A combination of two distributional models – Random Indexing and Random Permutation – employed in conjunction with a single corpus outperforms using either of the models in isolation. Furthermore, combining semantic spaces induced from different types of corpora – a corpus of clinical text and a corpus of medical journal articles – further improves results, outperforming a combination of semantic spaces induced from a single source, as well as a single semantic space induced from the conjoint corpus. A combination strategy that simply sums the cosine similarity scores of candidate terms is generally the most profitable out of the ones explored. Finally, applying simple post-processing filtering rules yields substantial performance gains on the tasks of extracting abbreviation-expansion pairs, but not synonyms. The best results, measured as recall in a list of ten candidate terms, for the three tasks are: 0.39 for abbreviations to long forms, 0.33 for long forms to abbreviations, and 0.47 for synonyms. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that ensembles of semantic spaces can yield improved performance on the tasks of automatically extracting synonyms and abbreviation-expansion pairs. This notion, which merits further exploration, allows different distributional models – with different model parameters – and different types of corpora to be combined, potentially allowing enhanced performance to be obtained on a wide range of natural language processing tasks.
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9. |
- Li, Xiu, et al.
(author)
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Automatic Educational Concept Extraction Using NLP
- 2022
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In: Methodologies and Intelligent Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning, 12th International Conference. - Cham : Springer Nature. - 9783031206177 - 9783031206160 ; , s. 133-138
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Educational concepts are the core of teaching and learning. From the perspective of educational technology, concepts are essential meta-data, represen- tative terms that can connect different learning materials, and are the foundation for many downstream tasks. Some studies on automatic concept extraction have been conducted, but there are no studies looking at the K-12 level and focused on the Swedish language. In this paper, we use a state-of-the-art Swedish BERT model to build an automatic concept extractor for the Biology subject using fine- annotated digital textbook data that cover all content for K-12. The model gives a recall measure of 72% and has the potential to be used in real-world settings for use cases that require high recall. Meanwhile, we investigate how input data fea- tures influence model performance and provide guidance on how to effectively use text data to achieve the optimal results when building a named entity recognition (NER) model.
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10. |
- Li, Xiu, et al.
(author)
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Evaluating Embeddings from Pre-Trained Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Educational Content Recommendation
- 2024
-
In: Future Internet. - 1999-5903. ; 16:1, s. 1-21
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Educational content recommendation is a cornerstone of AI-enhanced learning. In particular, to facilitate navigating the diverse learning resources available on learning platforms, methods are needed for automatically linking learning materials, e.g. in order to recommend textbook content based on exercises. Such methods are typically based on semantic textual similarity (STS) and the use of embeddings for text representation. However, it remains unclear what types of embeddings should be used for this task. In this study, we carry out an extensive empirical evaluation of embeddings derived from three different types of models: (i) static embeddings trained using a concept-based knowledge graph, (ii) contextual embeddings from a pre-trained language model, and (iii) contextual embeddings from a large language model (LLM). In addition to evaluating the models individually, various ensembles are explored based on different strategies for combining two models in an early vs. late fusion fashion. The evaluation is carried out using digital textbooks in Swedish for three different subjects and two types of exercises. The results show that using contextual embeddings from an LLM leads to superior performance compared to the other models, and that there is no significant improvement when combining these with static embeddings trained using a knowledge graph. When using embeddings derived from a smaller language model, however, it helps to combine them with knowledge graph embeddings. The performance of the best-performing model is high for both types of exercises, resulting in a mean Recall@3 of 0.96 and 0.95 and a mean MRR of 0.87 and 0.86 for quizzes and study questions, respectively, demonstrating the feasibility of using STS based on text embeddings for educational content recommendation. The ability to link digital learning materials in an unsupervised manner -- relying only on readily available pre-trained models -- facilitates the development of AI-enhanced learning.
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