We introduce a methodology for the identification of notifiable events in the domain of healthcare. The methodology harnesses semantic frames to define fine-grained patterns and search them in unstructured data, namely, open-text fields in e-medical records. We apply the methodology to the problem of underreporting of gender-based violence (GBV) in e-medical records produced during patients’ visits to primary care units. A total of eight patterns are defined and searched on a corpus of 21 million sentences in Brazilian Portuguese extracted from e-SUS APS. The results are manually evaluated by linguists and the precision of each pattern measured. Our findings reveal that the methodology effectively identifies reports of violence with a precision of 0.726, confirming its robustness. Designed as a transparent, efficient, low-carbon, and language-agnostic pipeline, the approach can be easily adapted to other health surveillance contexts, contributing to the broader, ethical, and explainable use of NLP in public health systems.

Gender-based violence (GBV) is a major public health issue, with the World Health Organization estimating that one in three women experiences physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner during her lifetime. In Brazil, although healthcare professionals are legally required to report such cases, underreporting remains significant due to difficulties in identifying abuse and limited integration between public information systems. This study investigates whether FrameNet-based semantic annotation of open-text fields in electronic medical records can support the identification of patterns of GBV. We compare the performance of an SVM classifier for GBV cases trained on (1) frame-annotated text, (2) annotated text combined with parameterized data, and (3) parameterized data alone. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that models incorporating semantic annotation outperform categorical models, achieving over 0.3 improvement in F1 score and demonstrating that domain-specific semantic representations provide meaningful signals beyond structured demographic data. The findings support the hypothesis that semantic analysis of clinical narratives can enhance early identification strategies and support more informed public health interventions.