Adverse Event Extraction from Discharge Summaries: A New Dataset, Annotation Scheme, and Initial Findings
Imane Guellil, Salomé Andres, Atul Anand, Bruce Guthrie, Huayu Zhang, Abul Hasan, Honghan Wu, Beatrice Alex
Abstract
In this work, we present a manually annotated corpus for Adverse Event (AE) extraction from discharge summaries of elderly patients, a population often underrepresented in clinical NLP resources. The dataset includes 14 clinically significant AEs—such as falls, delirium, and intracranial haemorrhage, along with contextual attributes like negation, diagnosis type, and in-hospital occurrence. Uniquely, the annotation schema supports both discontinuous and overlapping entities, addressing challenges rarely tackled in prior work. We evaluate multiple models using FlairNLP across three annotation granularities: fine-grained, coarse-grained, and coarse-grained with negation. While transformer-based models (e.g., BERT-cased) achieve strong performance on document-level coarse-grained extraction (F1 = 0.943), performance drops notably for fine-grained entity-level tasks (e.g., F1 = 0.675), particularly for rare events and complex attributes. These results demonstrate that despite high-level scores, significant challenges remain in detecting underrepresented AEs and capturing nuanced clinical language. Developed within a Trusted Research Environment (TRE), the dataset is available upon request via DataLoch and serves as a robust benchmark for evaluating AE extraction methods and supporting future cross-dataset generalisation.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.acl-long.1386
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Vienna, Austria
- Editors:
- Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 28532–28562
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1386/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Imane Guellil, Salomé Andres, Atul Anand, Bruce Guthrie, Huayu Zhang, Abul Hasan, Honghan Wu, and Beatrice Alex. 2025. Adverse Event Extraction from Discharge Summaries: A New Dataset, Annotation Scheme, and Initial Findings. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 28532–28562, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Adverse Event Extraction from Discharge Summaries: A New Dataset, Annotation Scheme, and Initial Findings (Guellil et al., ACL 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1386.pdf