Recent Advances in Clinical Natural Language Processing in Support of Semantic Analysis PMC

Since all the users may not be well-versed in machine specific language, Natural Language Processing (NLP) caters those users who do not have enough time to learn new languages or get perfection in it. In fact, NLP is a tract of Artificial Intelligence and Linguistics, devoted to make computers understand the statements or words written semantic analysis in natural language processing in human languages. It came into existence to ease the user’s work and to satisfy the wish to communicate with the computer in natural language, and can be classified into two parts i.e. Natural Language Understanding or Linguistics and Natural Language Generation which evolves the task to understand and generate the text.

Few of the examples of discriminative methods are Logistic regression and conditional random fields (CRFs), generative methods are Naive Bayes classifiers and hidden Markov models (HMMs). Natural language processing (NLP) is an area of computer science and artificial intelligence concerned with the interaction between computers and humans in natural language. The ultimate goal of NLP is to help computers understand language as well as we do.

Several recent studies with more clinically-oriented use cases show that NLP methods indeed play a crucial part for research progress. Often, these tasks are on a high semantic level, e.g. finding relevant documents for a specific clinical problem, or identifying patient cohorts. For instance, NLP methods were used to predict whether or not epilepsy patients were potential candidates for neurosurgery [80]. Clinical NLP has also been used in studies trying to generate or ascertain certain hypotheses by exploring large EHR corpora [81]. In other cases, NLP is part of a grander scheme dealing with problems that require competence from several areas, e.g. when connecting genes to reported patient phenotypes extracted from EHRs [82-83]. Hidden Markov Models are extensively used for speech recognition, where the output sequence is matched to the sequence of individual phonemes.

Automatically classifying tickets using semantic analysis tools alleviates agents from repetitive tasks and allows them to focus on tasks that provide more value while improving the whole customer experience. For accurate information extraction, contextual analysis is also crucial, particularly for including or excluding patient cases from semantic queries, e.g., including only patients with a family history of breast cancer for further study. Contextual modifiers include distinguishing asserted concepts (patient suffered a heart attack) from negated (not a heart attack) or speculative (possibly a heart attack). Other contextual aspects are equally important, such as severity (mild vs severe heart attack) or subject (patient or relative). Furthermore, NLP method development has been enabled by the release of these corpora, producing state-of-the-art results [17].

2 Challenges

As discussed in previous articles, NLP cannot decipher ambiguous words, which are words that can have more than one meaning in different contexts. Semantic analysis is key to contextualization that helps disambiguate language data so text-based NLP applications can be more accurate. This is a key concern for NLP practitioners responsible for the ROI and accuracy of their NLP programs. You can proactively get ahead of NLP problems by improving machine language understanding. Natural language processing brings together linguistics and algorithmic models to analyze written and spoken human language. Based on the content, speaker sentiment and possible intentions, NLP generates an appropriate response.

A lexicon- and regular-expression based system (TTK/GUTIME [67]) developed for general NLP was adapted for the clinical domain. The adapted system, MedTTK, outperformed TTK on clinical notes (86% vs 15% recall, 85% vs 27% precision), and is released to the research community [68]. In the 2012 i2b2 challenge on temporal relations, successful system approaches varied depending on the subtask. Using these approaches is better as classifier is learned from training data rather than making by hand.

Future Opportunities For Clinical NLP

A statistical parser originally developed for German was applied on Finnish nursing notes [38]. The parser was trained on a corpus of general Finnish as well as on small subsets of nursing notes. Best performance was reached when trained on the small clinical subsets than when trained on the larger, non-domain specific corpus (Labeled Attachment Score 77-85%). To identify pathological findings in German radiology reports, a semantic context-free grammar was developed, introducing a vocabulary acquisition step to handle incomplete terminology, resulting in 74% recall [39]. Several standards and corpora that exist in the general domain, e.g. the Brown Corpus and Penn Treebank tag sets for POS-tagging, have been adapted for the clinical domain.

The semantic similarity calculation model utilized in this study can also be applied to other types of translated texts. Translators can employ this model to compare their translations degree of similarity with previous translations, an approach that does not necessarily mandate a higher similarity to predecessors. This allows them to better realize the purpose and function of translation while assessing translation quality. The first step in a temporal reasoning system is to detect expressions that denote specific times of different types, such as dates and durations.

Some of the tasks such as automatic summarization, co-reference analysis etc. act as subtasks that are used in solving larger tasks. Nowadays NLP is in the talks because of various applications and recent developments although in the late 1940s the term wasn’t even in existence. So, it will be interesting to know about the history of NLP, the progress so far has been made and some of the ongoing projects by making use of NLP.

This study was based on a large and diverse set of clinical notes, where CRF models together with post-processing rules performed best (93% recall, 96% precision). Moreover, they showed that the task of extracting medication names on de-identified data did not decrease performance compared with non-anonymized data. Other efforts systematically analyzed what resources, texts, and pre-processing are needed for corpus creation. Jucket [19] proposed a generalizable method using probability weighting to determine how many texts are needed to create a reference standard. The method was evaluated on a corpus of dictation letters from the Michigan Pain Consultant clinics. Gundlapalli et al. [20] assessed the usefulness of pre-processing by applying v3NLP, a UIMA-AS-based framework, on the entire Veterans Affairs (VA) data repository, to reduce the review of texts containing social determinants of health, with a focus on homelessness.

It is because a single statement can be expressed in multiple ways without changing the intent and meaning of that statement. Evaluation metrics are important to evaluate the model’s performance if we were trying to solve two problems with one model. Fan et al. [41] introduced a gradient-based neural architecture search algorithm that automatically finds architecture with better performance than a transformer, conventional NMT models. They tested their model on WMT14 (English-German Translation), IWSLT14 (German-English translation), and WMT18 (Finnish-to-English translation) and achieved 30.1, 36.1, and 26.4 BLEU points, which shows better performance than Transformer baselines.

The semantic analysis does throw better results, but it also requires substantially more training and computation. Syntactic analysis involves analyzing the grammatical syntax of a sentence to understand its meaning. The idea of entity extraction is to identify named entities in text, such as names of people, companies, places, etc. With the help of meaning representation, we can link linguistic elements to non-linguistic elements.

Since LSA is essentially a truncated SVD, we can use LSA for document-level analysis such as document clustering, document classification, etc or we can also build word vectors for word-level analysis. SVD is used in such situations because, unlike PCA, SVD does not require a correlation matrix or a covariance matrix to decompose. In that sense, SVD is free from any normality assumption of data (covariance calculation assumes a normal distribution of data). The U matrix is the document-aspect matrix, V is the word-aspect matrix, and ∑ is the diagonal matrix of the singular values. Similar to PCA, SVD also combines columns of the original matrix linearly to arrive at the U matrix. To arrive at the V matrix, SVD combines the rows of the original matrix linearly.

Additionally, blog data is becoming an important tool for helping patients and their families cope and understand life-changing illness. Many of these corpora address the following important subtasks of semantic analysis on clinical text. Phonology is the part of Linguistics which refers to the systematic arrangement of sound. The term phonology comes from Ancient Greek in which the term phono means voice or sound and the suffix –logy refers to word or speech. Phonology includes semantic use of sound to encode meaning of any Human language. You see, the word on its own matters less, and the words surrounding it matter more for the interpretation.

Powerful semantic-enhanced machine learning tools will deliver valuable insights that drive better decision-making and improve customer experience. It’s an essential sub-task of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the driving force behind machine learning tools like chatbots, search engines, and text analysis. The above outcome shows how correctly LSA could extract the most relevant document. However, as mentioned earlier, there are other word vectors available that can produce more interesting results but, when dealing with relatively smaller data, LSA-based document vector creation can be quite helpful. Document clustering is helpful in many ways to cluster documents based on their similarities with each other.

As early as 1960, signature work influenced by AI began, with the BASEBALL Q-A systems (Green et al., 1961) [51]. LUNAR (Woods,1978) [152] and Winograd SHRDLU were natural successors of these systems, but they were seen as stepped-up sophistication, in terms of their linguistic and their task processing capabilities. There was a widespread belief that progress could only be made on the two sides, one is ARPA Speech Understanding Research (SUR) project (Lea, 1980) and other in some major system developments projects building database front ends. The front-end projects (Hendrix et al., 1978) [55] were intended to go beyond LUNAR in interfacing the large databases.

An important aspect in improving patient care and healthcare processes is to better handle cases of adverse events (AE) and medication errors (ME). A study on Danish psychiatric hospital patient records [95] describes a rule- and dictionary-based approach to detect adverse drug effects (ADEs), resulting in 89% precision, and 75% recall. Another notable work reports an SVM and pattern matching study for detecting ADEs in Japanese discharge summaries [96]. ICD-9 and ICD-10 (version 9 and 10 respectively) denote the international classification of diseases [89]. ICD codes are usually assigned manually either by the physician herself or by trained manual coders.

How does natural language processing work?

In the case of a domain specific search engine, the automatic identification of important information can increase accuracy and efficiency of a directed search. There is use of hidden Markov models (HMMs) to extract the relevant fields of research papers. These extracted text segments are used to allow searched over specific fields and to provide effective presentation of search results and to match references to papers. For example, noticing the pop-up ads on any websites showing the recent items you might have looked on an online store with discounts. In Information Retrieval two types of models have been used (McCallum and Nigam, 1998) [77].

Likewise, the word ‘rock’ may mean ‘a stone‘ or ‘a genre of music‘ – hence, the accurate meaning of the word is highly dependent upon its context and usage in the text. A “stem” is the part of a word that remains after the removal of all affixes. For example, the stem for the word “touched” is “touch.” “Touch” is also the stem of “touching,” and so on. With structure I mean that we have the verb (“robbed”), which is marked with a “V” above it and a “VP” above that, which is linked with a “S” to the subject (“the thief”), which has a “NP” above it. This is like a template for a subject-verb relationship and there are many others for other types of relationships.

Natural language processing is the field which aims to give the machines the ability of understanding natural languages. Semantic analysis is a sub topic, out of many sub topics discussed in this field. This article aims to address the main topics discussed in semantic analysis to give a brief understanding for a beginner. The observations regarding translation differences extend to other core conceptual words in The Analects, a subset of which is displayed in Table 9 due to space constraints.

Also, words can have several meanings and contextual information is necessary to correctly interpret sentences. Just take a look at the following newspaper headline “The Pope’s baby steps on gays.” This sentence clearly has two very different interpretations, which is a pretty good example of the challenges in natural language processing. Table 8a, b display the high-frequency words and phrases observed in sentence pairs with semantic similarity scores below 80%, after comparing the results from the five translations.

The purpose of semantic analysis is to draw exact meaning, or you can say dictionary meaning from the text. Thus, either the clusters are not linearly separable or there is a considerable amount of overlaps among them. The TSNE plot extracts a low dimensional representation of high dimensional data through a non-linear embedding method which tries to retain the local structure of the data. This means that most of the words are semantically linked to other words to express a theme. So, if words are occurring in a collection of documents with varying frequencies, it should indicate how different people try to express themselves using different words and different topics or themes.

At the same time, it provides an intuitive comparison of the degrees of semantic similarity. New morphological and syntactic processing applications have been developed for clinical texts. CTAKES [36] is a UIMA-based NLP software providing modules for several clinical NLP processing steps, such as tokenization, POS-tagging, dependency parsing, and semantic processing, and continues to be widely-adopted and extended by the clinical NLP community. The variety of clinical note types requires domain adaptation approaches even within the clinical domain.

Here the speaker just initiates the process doesn’t take part in the language generation. It stores the history, structures the content that is potentially relevant and deploys a representation of what it knows. All these forms the situation, while selecting subset of propositions that speaker has. Now, we have a brief idea of meaning representation that shows how to put together the building blocks of semantic systems. In other words, it shows how to put together entities, concepts, relations, and predicates to describe a situation.

In fact, MT/NLP research almost died in 1966 according to the ALPAC report, which concluded that MT is going nowhere. But later, some MT production systems were providing output to their customers (Hutchins, 1986) [60]. By this time, work on the use of computers for literary and linguistic studies had also started.

An Overview of Conversational AI- Understanding Its Popularity

Under this architecture, the search space of candidate answers is reduced while preserving the hierarchical, syntactic, and compositional structure among constituents. Merity et al. [86] extended conventional word-level language models based on Quasi-Recurrent Neural Network and LSTM to handle the granularity at character and word level. They tuned the parameters for character-level modeling using Penn Treebank dataset and word-level modeling using WikiText-103.

For comparative analysis, this study has compiled various interpretations of certain core conceptual terms across five translations of The Analects. This dataset has promoted the dissemination of adapted guidelines and the development of several open-source modules. In clinical practice, there is a growing curiosity and demand for NLP applications.

That means the sense of the word depends on the neighboring words of that particular word. Likewise word sense disambiguation (WSD) means selecting the correct word sense for a particular word. WSD can have a huge impact on machine translation, question answering, information retrieval and text classification. Out of the entire corpus, 1,940 sentence pairs exhibit a semantic similarity of ≤ 80%, comprising 21.8% of the total sentence pairs. These low-similarity sentence pairs play a significant role in determining the overall similarity between the different translations.

What Semantic Analysis Means to Natural Language Processing

This formal structure that is used to understand the meaning of a text is called meaning representation. Semantic Analysis is a subfield of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that attempts to understand the meaning of Natural Language. Understanding Natural Language might seem a straightforward process to us as humans. However, due to the vast complexity and subjectivity involved in human language, interpreting it is quite a complicated task for machines. Semantic Analysis of Natural Language captures the meaning of the given text while taking into account context, logical structuring of sentences and grammar roles.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Today, NLP tends to be based on turning natural language into machine language. But with time the technology matures – especially the AI component –the computer will get better at “understanding” the query and start to deliver answers rather than search results. Initially, the data chatbot will probably ask the question ‘how have revenues changed over the last three-quarters?. But once it learns the semantic relations and inferences of the question, it will be able to automatically perform the filtering and formulation necessary to provide an intelligible answer, rather than simply showing you data. The Linguistic String Project-Medical Language Processor is one the large scale projects of NLP in the field of medicine [21, 53, 57, 71, 114]. The LSP-MLP helps enabling physicians to extract and summarize information of any signs or symptoms, drug dosage and response data with the aim of identifying possible side effects of any medicine while highlighting or flagging data items [114].

In Table 3, “NO.” refers to the specific sentence identifiers assigned to individual English translations of The Analects from the corpus referenced above. “Translator 1” and “Translator 2” correspond to the respective translators, and their translations undergo a comparative analysis to ascertain semantic concordance. The columns labeled “Word2Vec,” “GloVe,” and “BERT” present outcomes derived from their respective semantic similarity algorithms. Subsequently, the “AVG” column presents the mean semantic similarity value, computed from the aforementioned algorithms, serving as the basis for ranking translations by their semantic congruence. By calculating the average value of the three algorithms, errors produced in the comparison can be effectively reduced.

As English translations of The Analects continue to evolve, future translators can further enhance this work by summarizing and supplementing paratextual information, thereby building on the foundations established by their predecessors. By integrating insights from previous translators and leveraging paratextual information, future translators can provide more precise and comprehensive explanations of core concepts and personal names, thus enriching readers’ understanding of these terms. Morphological and syntactic preprocessing can be a useful step for subsequent semantic analysis. For example, prefixes in English can signify the negation of a concept, e.g., afebrile means without fever. Furthermore, a concept’s meaning can depend on its part of speech (POS), e.g., discharge as a noun can mean fluid from a wound; whereas a verb can mean to permit someone to vacate a care facility.

Figure 1 primarily illustrates the performance of three distinct NLP algorithms in quantifying semantic similarity. 1, although there are variations in the absolute values among the algorithms, they consistently reflect a similar trend in semantic similarity across sentence pairs. This suggests that while the selection of a specific NLP algorithm in practical applications may hinge on particular scenarios and requirements, in terms of overall semantic similarity judgments, their reliability remains consistent. For example, a sentence that exhibits low similarity according to the Word2Vec algorithm tends to also score lower on the similarity results in the GloVe and BERT algorithms, although it may not necessarily be the lowest.

The naïve bayes is preferred because of its performance despite its simplicity (Lewis, 1998) [67] In Text Categorization two types of models have been used (McCallum and Nigam, 1998) [77]. But in first model a document is generated by first choosing a subset of vocabulary and then using the selected words any number of times, at least once irrespective of order. This model is called multi-nomial model, in addition to the Multi-variate Bernoulli model, it also captures information on how many times a word is used in a document. Most text categorization approaches to anti-spam Email filtering have used multi variate Bernoulli model (Androutsopoulos et al., 2000) [5] [15].

It is the driving force behind things like virtual assistants, speech recognition, sentiment analysis, automatic text summarization, machine translation and much more. In this post, we’ll cover the basics of natural language processing, dive into some of its techniques and also learn how NLP has benefited from recent advances in deep learning. In this survey, we outlined recent advances in clinical NLP for a multitude of languages with a focus on semantic analysis. Substantial progress has been made for key NLP sub-tasks that enable such analysis (i.e. methods for more efficient corpus construction and de-identification). Furthermore, research on (deeper) semantic aspects – linguistic levels, named entity recognition and contextual analysis, coreference resolution, and temporal modeling – has gained increased interest.

NLP can also be trained to pick out unusual information, allowing teams to spot fraudulent claims. While NLP-powered chatbots and callbots are most common in customer service contexts, companies have also relied on natural language processing to power virtual assistants. These assistants are a form of conversational AI that can carry on more sophisticated discussions. And if NLP is unable to resolve an issue, it can connect a customer with the appropriate personnel.

• From readers cognitive enhancement perspective, this approach can significantly improve readers’ understanding and reading fluency, thus enhancing reading efficiency.
• Compiling this data can help marketing teams understand what consumers care about and how they perceive a business’ brand.
• Pragmatic analysis helps users to uncover the intended meaning of the text by applying contextual background knowledge.
• The most important task of semantic analysis is to get the proper meaning of the sentence.
• This is a key concern for NLP practitioners responsible for the ROI and accuracy of their NLP programs.

And if we want to know the relationship of or between sentences, we train a neural network to make those decisions for us. Syntactic analysis (syntax) and semantic analysis (semantic) are the two primary techniques that lead to the understanding of natural language. For translators, in the process of translating The Analects, it is crucial to accurately convey core conceptual terms and personal names, utilizing relevant vocabulary and providing pertinent supplementary information in the para-text. The author advocates for a compensatory approach in translating core conceptual words and personal names.

In machine translation done by deep learning algorithms, language is translated by starting with a sentence and generating vector representations that represent it. Then it starts to generate words in another language that entail the same information. Recruiters and HR personnel can use natural language processing to sift through hundreds of resumes, picking out promising candidates based on keywords, education, skills and other criteria. In addition, NLP’s data analysis capabilities are ideal for reviewing employee surveys and quickly determining how employees feel about the workplace. With sentiment analysis we want to determine the attitude (i.e. the sentiment) of a speaker or writer with respect to a document, interaction or event. Therefore it is a natural language processing problem where text needs to be understood in order to predict the underlying intent.