Chinese Clinical Named Entity Recognition With Segmentation Synonym Sentence Synthesis Mechanism: Algorithm Development and Validation

Background: Clinical named entity recognition (CNER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing used to extract named entities from electronic medical record texts. In recent years, with the continuous development of machine learning, deep learning models have replaced traditional machine learning and template-based methods, becoming widely applied in the CNER field. However, due to the complexity of clinical texts, the diversity and large quantity of named entity types, and the unclear boundaries between different entities, existing advanced methods rely to some extent on annotated databases and the scale of embedded dictionaries. Objective: This study aims to address the issues of data scarcity and labeling difficulties in CNER tasks by proposing a dataset augmentation algorithm based on proximity word calculation. Methods: We propose a Segmentation Synonym Sentence Synthesis (SSSS) algorithm based on neighboring vocabulary, which leverages existing public knowledge without the need for manual expansion of specialized domain dictionaries. Through lexical segmentation, the algorithm replaces new synonymous vocabulary by recombining from vast natural language data, achieving nearby expansion expressions of the dataset. We applied the SSSS algorithm to the Robustly Optimized Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers Pretraining Approach (RoBERTa) + conditional random field (CRF) and RoBERTa + Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) + CRF models and evaluated our models (SSSS + RoBERTa + CRF; SSSS + RoBERTa + BiLSTM + CRF) on the China Conference on Knowledge Graph and Semantic Computing (CCKS) 2017 and 2019 datasets. Results: Our experiments demonstrated that the models SSSS + RoBERTa + CRF and SSSS + RoBERTa + BiLSTM + CRF achieved F1-scores of 91.30% and 91.35% on the CCKS-2017 dataset, respectively. They also achieved F1-scores of 83.21% and 83.01% on the CCKS-2019 dataset, respectively. Conclusions: The experimental results indicated that our proposed method successfully expanded the dataset and remarkably improved the performance of the model, effectively addressing the challenges of data acquisition, annotation difficulties, and insufficient model generalization performance.

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