title: A la Recherche du Temps Perdu: extracting temporal relations from medical text in the 2012 i2b2 NLP challenge.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  An analysis of the timing of events is critical for a deeper understanding of the course of events within a patient record. The 2012 i2b2 NLP challenge focused on the extraction of temporal relationships between concepts within textual hospital discharge summaries.
  
  
  METHODS
  The team from the National Research Council Canada (NRC) submitted three system runs to the second track of the challenge: typifying the time-relationship between pre-annotated entities. The NRC system was designed around four specialist modules containing statistical machine learning classifiers. Each specialist targeted distinct sets of relationships: local relationships, 'sectime'-type relationships, non-local overlap-type relationships, and non-local causal relationships.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The best NRC submission achieved a precision of 0.7499, a recall of 0.6431, and an F1 score of 0.6924, resulting in a statistical tie for first place. Post hoc improvements led to a precision of 0.7537, a recall of 0.6455, and an F1 score of 0.6954, giving the highest scores reported on this task to date.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Methods for general relation extraction extended well to temporal relations, and gave top-ranked state-of-the-art results. Careful ordering of predictions within result sets proved critical to this success.
authors.affiliation: Information and Communication Technologies, National Research Council Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Colin
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Cherry
authors.forename: Xiaodan
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.forename: Joel
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Martin
authors.forename: Berry
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: de Bruijn
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D063886:Patient Discharge Summaries; D013995:Time; D057170:Translational Research, Biomedical
keywords: clinical text; information extraction; natural language processing; relation extraction; temporal reasoning