Medical Concept Embeddings via Labeled Background Corpora

Eneldo Loza Mencía, Gerard de Melo, Jinseok Nam


Abstract
In recent years, we have seen an increasing amount of interest in low-dimensional vector representations of words. Among other things, these facilitate computing word similarity and relatedness scores. The most well-known example of algorithms to produce representations of this sort are the word2vec approaches. In this paper, we investigate a new model to induce such vector spaces for medical concepts, based on a joint objective that exploits not only word co-occurrences but also manually labeled documents, as available from sources such as PubMed. Our extensive experimental analysis shows that our embeddings lead to significantly higher correlations with human similarity and relatedness assessments than previous work. Due to the simplicity and versatility of vector representations, these findings suggest that our resource can easily be used as a drop-in replacement to improve any systems relying on medical concept similarity measures.
Anthology ID:
L16-1733
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
4629–4636
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1733
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eneldo Loza Mencía, Gerard de Melo, and Jinseok Nam. 2016. Medical Concept Embeddings via Labeled Background Corpora. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 4629–4636, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Medical Concept Embeddings via Labeled Background Corpora (Mencía et al., LREC 2016)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/L16-1733.pdf