Beyond NER: Towards Semantics in Clinical Text

While clinical text NLP systems have become very effective in recognizing named entities in clinical text and mapping them to standardized terminologies in the normalization process, there remains a gap in the ability of extractors to combine entities together into a complete semantic representation of medical concepts that contain multiple attributes each of which has its own set of allowed named entities or values. Furthermore, additional domain knowledge may be required to determine the semantics of particular tokens in the text that take on special meanings in relation to this concept. This research proposes an approach that provides ontological mappings of the surface forms of medical concepts that are of the UMLS semantic class signs/symptoms. The mappings are used to extract and encode the constituent set of named entities into interoperable semantic structures that can be linked to other structured and unstructured data for reuse in research and analysis.