Learning Portuguese Clinical Word Embeddings: A Multi-Specialty and Multi-Institutional Corpus of Clinical Narratives Supporting a Downstream Biomedical Task

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2019 Aug 21:264:123-127. doi: 10.3233/SHTI190196.

Abstract

In this paper, we trained a set of Portuguese clinical word embedding models of different granularities from multi-specialty and multi-institutional clinical narrative datasets. Then, we assessed their impact on a downstream biomedical NLP task of Urinary Tract Infection disease identification. Additionally, we intrinsically evaluated our main model using an adapted version of Bio-SimLex for the Portuguese language. Our empirical results showed that the larger, coarse-grained model achieved a slightly better outcome when compared with the small, fine-grained model in the proposed task. Moreover, we obtained satisfactory results with Bio-SimLex intrinsic evaluation.

Keywords: Electronic Health Records; Natural Language Processing.

MeSH terms

  • Language
  • Machine Learning*
  • Narration
  • Natural Language Processing*
  • Portugal