NLP Whack-A-Mole: Challenges in Cross-Domain Temporal Expression Extraction

Amy Olex, Luke Maffey, Bridget McInnes


Abstract
Incorporating domain knowledge is vital in building successful natural language processing (NLP) applications. Many times, cross-domain application of a tool results in poor performance as the tool does not account for domain-specific attributes. The clinical domain is challenging in this aspect due to specialized medical terms and nomenclature, shorthand notation, fragmented text, and a variety of writing styles used by different medical units. Temporal resolution is an NLP task that, in general, is domain-agnostic because temporal information is represented using a limited lexicon. However, domain-specific aspects of temporal resolution are present in clinical texts. Here we explore parsing issues that arose when running our system, a tool built on Newswire text, on clinical notes in the THYME corpus. Many parsing issues were straightforward to correct; however, a few code changes resulted in a cascading series of parsing errors that had to be resolved before an improvement in performance was observed, revealing the complexity temporal resolution and rule-based parsing. Our system now outperforms current state-of-the-art systems on the THYME corpus with little change in its performance on Newswire texts.
Anthology ID:
N19-1369
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3682–3692
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1369
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1369
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Amy Olex, Luke Maffey, and Bridget McInnes. 2019. NLP Whack-A-Mole: Challenges in Cross-Domain Temporal Expression Extraction. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 3682–3692, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NLP Whack-A-Mole: Challenges in Cross-Domain Temporal Expression Extraction (Olex et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1369.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/359707022