Papers & Conferences

Named entity recognition (NER) is a widely applicable natural language processing task and building block of question answering, topic modeling, information retrieval, etc. In the medical domain, NER plays a crucial role by extracting meaningful chunks from clinical notes and reports, which are then fed to downstream tasks like assertion status detection, entity resolution, relation extraction, and de-identification.

Reimplementing a Bi-LSTM-CNN-Char deep learning architecture on top of Apache Spark, we present a single trainable NER model that obtains new state-of-the-art results on seven public biomedical benchmarks without using heavy contextual embeddings like BERT. This includes improving BC4CHEMD to 93.72% (4.1% gain), Species800 to 80.91% (4.6% gain), and JNLPBA to 81.29% (5.2% gain).

Following the global COVID-19 pandemic, the number of scientific papers studying the virus has grown massively, leading to increased interest in automated literate review. We present a clinical text mining system that improves on previous efforts.

First, it can recognize over 100 different entity types including social determinants of health, anatomy, risk factors, and adverse events in addition to other commonly used clinical and biomedical entities. We illustrate extracting trends and insights, e.g. most frequent disorders and symptoms, and most common vital signs and EKG findings, from the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19).

Second, the text processing pipeline includes assertion status detection, to distinguish between clinical facts that are present, absent, conditional, or about someone other than the patient. The deep learning models used improve on the previous best performing benchmarks for assertion status detection.

Spark NLP is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) library built on top of Apache Spark ML. It provides simple, performant & accurate NLP annotations for machine learning pipelines that can scale easily in a distributed environment.

Spark NLP comes with 1100+ pretrained pipelines and models in more than 192+ languages. It supports nearly all the NLP tasks and modules that can be used seamlessly in a cluster. Downloaded more than 2.7 million times and experiencing 9x growth since January 2020, Spark NLP is used by 54% of healthcare organizations as the world’s most widely used NLP library in the enterprise.