Multi-level semantic fusion network for Chinese medical named entity recognition.

Medical named entity recognition (MNER) is a fundamental component of understanding the unstructured medical texts in electronic health records, and it has received widespread attention in both academia and industry. However, the previous approaches of MNER do not make full use of hierarchical semantics from morphology to syntactic relationships like word dependency. Furthermore, extracting entities from Chinese medical texts is a more complex task because it usually contains for example homophones or pictophonetic characters. In this paper, we propose a multi-level semantic fusion network for Chinese medical named entity recognition, which fuses semantic information on morphology, character, word and syntactic level. We take radical as morphology semantic, pinyin and character dictionary as character semantic, word dictionary as word semantic, and these semantic features are fused by BiLSTM to get the contextualized representation. Then we use a graph neural network to model word dependency as syntactic semantic to enhance the contextualized representation. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed model on two public datasets and robustness in real-world scenarios.

Composition-driven symptom phrase recognition for Chinese medical consultation corpora.

BACKGROUND: Symptom phrase recognition is essential to improve the use of unstructured medical consultation corpora for the development of automated question answering systems. A majority of previous works typically require enough manually annotated training data or as complete a symptom dictionary as possible. However, when applied to real scenarios, they will face a dilemma due to the scarcity of the annotated textual resources and the diversity of the spoken language expressions. METHODS: In this paper, we propose a composition-driven method to recognize the symptom phrases from Chinese medical consultation corpora without any annotations. The basic idea is to directly learn models that capture the composition, i.e., the arrangement of the symptom components (semantic units of words). We introduce an automatic annotation strategy for the standard symptom phrases which are collected from multiple data sources. In particular, we combine the position information and the interaction scores between symptom components to characterize the symptom phrases. Equipped with such models, we are allowed to robustly extract symptom phrases that are not seen before. RESULTS: Without any manual annotations, our method achieves strong positive results on symptom phrase recognition tasks. Experiments also show that our method enjoys great potential with access to plenty of corpora. CONCLUSIONS: Compositionality offers a feasible solution for extracting information from unstructured free text with scarce labels.

Inter-Patient ECG Classification With Symbolic Representations and Multi-Perspective Convolutional Neural Networks.

This paper presents a novel deep learning framework for the inter-patient electrocardiogram (ECG) heartbeat classification. A symbolization approach especially designed for ECG is introduced, which can jointly represent the morphology and rhythm of the heartbeat and alleviate the influence of inter-patient variation through baseline correction. The symbolic representation of the heartbeat is used by a multi-perspective convolutional neural network (MPCNN) to learn features automatically and classify the heartbeat. We evaluate our method for the detection of the supraventricular ectopic beat (SVEB) and ventricular ectopic beat (VEB) on MIT-BIH arrhythmia dataset. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods based on manual features or deep learning models, our method shows superior performance: the overall accuracy of 96.4%, F1 scores for SVEB and VEB of 76.6% and 89.7%, respectively. The ablation study on our method validates the effectiveness of the proposed symbolization approach and joint representation architecture, which can help the deep learning model to learn more general features and improve the ability of generalization for unseen patients. Because our method achieves a competitive inter-patient heartbeat classification performance without complex handcrafted features or the intervention of the human expert, it can also be adjusted to handle various other tasks relative to ECG classification.

Discriminative structure learning of sum-product networks for data stream classification.

Sum-product network (SPN) is a deep probabilistic representation that allows for exact and tractable inference. There has been a trend of online SPN structure learning from massive and continuous data streams. However, online structure learning of SPNs has been introduced only for the generative settings so far. In this paper, we present an online discriminative approach for SPNs for learning both the structure and parameters. The basic idea is to keep track of informative and representative examples to capture the trend of time-changing class distributions. Specifically, by estimating the goodness of model fitting of data points and dynamically maintaining a certain amount of informative examples over time, we generate new sub-SPNs in a recursive and top-down manner. Meanwhile, an outlier-robust margin-based log-likelihood loss is applied locally to each data point and the parameters of SPN are updated continuously using most probable explanation (MPE) inference. This leads to a fast yet powerful optimization procedure and improved discrimination capability between the genuine class and rival classes. Empirical results show that the proposed approach achieves better prediction performance than the state-of-the-art online structure learner for SPNs, while promising order-of-magnitude speedup. Comparison with state-of-the-art stream classifiers further proves the superiority of our approach.

Developing learning algorithms via optimized discretization of continuous dynamical systems.

Most of the existing numerical optimization methods are based upon a discretization of some ordinary differential equations. In order to solve some convex and smooth optimization problems coming from machine learning, in this paper, we develop efficient batch and online algorithms based on a new principle, i.e., the optimized discretization of continuous dynamical systems (ODCDSs). First, a batch learning projected gradient dynamical system with Lyapunov's stability and monotonic property is introduced, and its dynamical behavior guarantees the accuracy of discretization-based optimizer and applicability of line search strategy. Furthermore, under fair assumptions, a new online learning algorithm achieving regret O(√T) or O(logT) is obtained. By using the line search strategy, the proposed batch learning ODCDS exhibits insensitivity to the step sizes and faster decrease. With only a small number of line search steps, the proposed stochastic algorithm shows sufficient stability and approximate optimality. Experimental results demonstrate the correctness of our theoretical analysis and efficiency of our algorithms.