title: Towards a Generalizable Time Expression Model for Temporal Reasoning in Clinical Notes.
abstract: Accurate temporal identification and normalization is imperative for many biomedical and clinical tasks such as generating timelines and identifying phenotypes. A major natural language processing challenge is developing and evaluating a generalizable temporal modeling approach that performs well across corpora and institutions. Our long-term goal is to create such a model. We initiate our work on reaching this goal by focusing on temporal expression (TIMEX3) identification. We present a systematic approach to 1) generalize existing solutions for automated TIMEX3 span detection, and 2) assess similarities and differences by various instantiations of TIMEX3 models applied on separate clinical corpora. When evaluated on the 2012 i2b2 and the 2015 Clinical TempEval challenge corpora, our conclusion is that our approach is successful - we achieve competitive results for automated classification, and we identify similarities and differences in TIMEX3 modeling that will be informative in the development of a simplified, general temporal model.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV), Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden; Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT.
authors.forename: Sumithra
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Velupillai
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT.
authors.forename: Danielle L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Mowery
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT; Computer Science Department, Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University, Egypt.
authors.forename: Samir
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Abdelrahman
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT.
authors.forename: Lee
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Christensen
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT.
authors.forename: Wendy W
authors.initials: WW
authors.lastname: Chapman
mesh_terms: D057286:Electronic Health Records; D006801:Humans; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D013995:Time