Information extraction with neural networks

Electronic health records (EHRs) have been widely adopted, and are a gold mine for clinical research. However, EHRs, especially their text components, remain largely unexplored due to the fact that they must be de-identified prior to any medical investigation. Existing systems for de-identification rely on manual rules or features, which are time-consuming to develop and fine-tune for new datasets. In this thesis, we propose the first de-identification system based on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which achieves state-of-the-art results without any human-engineered features. The ANN architecture is extended to incorporate features, further improving the de-identification performance. Under practical considerations, we explore transfer learning to take advantage of large annotated dataset to improve the performance on datasets with limited number of annotations. The ANN-based system is publicly released as an easy-to-use software package for general purpose named-entity recognition as well as de-identification. Finally, we present an ANN architecture for relation extraction, which ranked first in the SemEval-2017 task 10 (ScienceIE) for relation extraction in scientific articles (subtask C).

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Lee, Ji Young, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Peter Szolovits.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/111905

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/111905