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
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Pages:
28532–28562
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1386/
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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)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1386.pdf