Chinese EMR Named Entity Recognition Using Fused Label Relations Based on Machine Reading Comprehension Framework.

Abstract

Chinese electronic medical records (EMR) presents significant challenges for named entity recognition (NER) due to their specialized nature, unique language features, and diverse expressions. Traditionally, NER is treated as a sequence labeling task, where each token is assigned a label. Recent research has reframed NER within the machine reading comprehension (MRC) framework, extracting entities in a question-answer format, achieving state-of-the-art performance. However, these MRC-based methods have a significant limitation: they extract entities of various types independently, ignoring their interrelations. To address this, we introduce the Fusion Label Relations with MRC (FLR-MRC) model, which enhances the MRC model by implicitly capturing dependencies among entity types. FLR-MRC models interrelations between labels using graph attention networks, integrating these with textual data to identify entities. On the benchmark CMeEE and CCKS2017-CNER datasets, FLR-MRC achieves F1-scores of 0.6652 and 0.9101, respectively, outperforming existing clinical NER methods.