Robust Representation Learning of Biomedical Names

Minh C. Phan, Aixin Sun, Yi Tay


Abstract
Biomedical concepts are often mentioned in medical documents under different name variations (synonyms). This mismatch between surface forms is problematic, resulting in difficulties pertaining to learning effective representations. Consequently, this has tremendous implications such as rendering downstream applications inefficacious and/or potentially unreliable. This paper proposes a new framework for learning robust representations of biomedical names and terms. The idea behind our approach is to consider and encode contextual meaning, conceptual meaning, and the similarity between synonyms during the representation learning process. Via extensive experiments, we show that our proposed method outperforms other baselines on a battery of retrieval, similarity and relatedness benchmarks. Moreover, our proposed method is also able to compute meaningful representations for unseen names, resulting in high practical utility in real-world applications.
Anthology ID:
P19-1317
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3275–3285
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1317
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1317
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Minh C. Phan, Aixin Sun, and Yi Tay. 2019. Robust Representation Learning of Biomedical Names. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3275–3285, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Robust Representation Learning of Biomedical Names (Phan et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/P19-1317.pdf
Data
BC5CDRNCBI Disease