Skip to main content
Article
Deep Contextualized Biomedical Abbreviation Expansion
Proceedings of the 18th BioNLP Workshop and Shared Task (2019, Florence, Italy)
  • Qiao Jin
  • Jinling Liu, Missouri University of Science and Technology
  • Xinghua Lu
Abstract

Automatic identification and expansion of ambiguous abbreviations are essential for biomedical natural language processing applications, such as information retrieval and question answering systems. In this paper, we present DEep Contextualized Biomedical. Abbreviation Expansion (DECBAE) model. DECBAE automatically collects substantial and relatively clean annotated contexts for 950 ambiguous abbreviations from PubMed abstracts using a simple heuristic. Then it utilizes BioELMo to extract the contextualized features of words, and feed those features to abbreviation-specific bidirectional LSTMs, where the hidden states of the ambiguous abbreviations are used to assign the exact definitions. Our DECBAE model outperforms other baselines by large margins, achieving average accuracy of 0.961 and macro-F1 of 0.917 on the dataset. It also surpasses human performance for expanding a sample abbreviation, and remains robust in imbalanced, low-resources and clinical settings.

Meeting Name
18th BioNLP Workshop and Shared Task (2019: Aug. 1, Florence, Italy)
Department(s)
Engineering Management and Systems Engineering
Second Department
Biological Sciences
Research Center/Lab(s)
Center for High Performance Computing Research
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2019 Association for Computational Linguistics, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
1-1-2019
Publication Date
01 Jan 2019
Disciplines
Citation Information
Qiao Jin, Jinling Liu and Xinghua Lu. "Deep Contextualized Biomedical Abbreviation Expansion" Proceedings of the 18th BioNLP Workshop and Shared Task (2019, Florence, Italy) (2019) p. 88 - 96
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/jinling-liu/2/