ChemTok: A New Rule Based Tokenizer for Chemical Named Entity Recognition

Named Entity Recognition (NER) from text constitutes the first step in many text mining applications. The most important preliminary step for NER systems using machine learning approaches is tokenization where raw text is segmented into tokens. This study proposes an enhanced rule based tokenizer, ChemTok, which utilizes rules extracted mainly from the train data set. The main novelty of ChemTok is the use of the extracted rules in order to merge the tokens split in the previous steps, thus producing longer and more discriminative tokens. ChemTok is compared to the tokenization methods utilized by ChemSpot and tmChem. Support Vector Machines and Conditional Random Fields are employed as the learning algorithms. The experimental results show that the classifiers trained on the output of ChemTok outperforms all classifiers trained on the output of the other two tokenizers in terms of classification performance, and the number of incorrectly segmented entities

A Comparison of Deep Learning Methods for ICD Coding of Clinical Records

In this survey, we discuss the task of automatically classifying medical documents into the taxonomy of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), by the use of deep neural networks. The literature in this domain covers different techniques. We will assess and compare the performance of those techniques in various settings and investigate which combination leverages the best results. Furthermore, we introduce an hierarchical component that exploits the knowledge of the ICD taxonomy. All methods and their combinations are evaluated on two publicly available datasets that represent ICD-9 and ICD-10 coding, respectively. The evaluation leads to a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the models

Fine-Tuned Large Language Models for Symptom Recognition from Spanish Clinical Text

<h3><strong>Abstract</strong></h3><p>The accurate recognition of symptoms in clinical reports is significantly important in the fields of healthcare and biomedical natural language processing. These entities serve as essential building blocks for clinical information extraction, enabling retrieval of critical medical insights from vast amounts of textual data. Furthermore, the ability to identify and categorize these entities is fundamental for developing advanced clinical decision support systems, aiding healthcare professionals in diagnosis and treatment planning. In this study, we participated in SympTEMIST – a shared task on detection of symptoms, signs and findings in Spanish medical documents. We combine a set of large language models finetuned with the data released by the task's organizers.</p><p> </p><p>This article is part of the <a href="https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10103190">Proceedings of the BioCreative VIII Challenge and Workshop: Curation and Evaluation in the era of Generative Models</a>.</p&gt