Do Numbers Matter? Types and Prevalence of Numbers in Clinical Texts
Rahmad Mahendra, Damiano Spina, Lawrence Cavedon, Karin Verspoor
Abstract
In this short position paper, we highlight the importance of numbers in clinical text. We first present a taxonomy of number variants. We then perform corpus analysis to analyze characteristics of number use in several clinical corpora. Based on our findings of extensive use of numbers, and limited understanding of the impact of numbers on clinical NLP tasks, we identify the need for a public benchmark that will support investigation of numerical processing tasks for the clinical domain.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.bionlp-1.32
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 23rd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Editors:
- Dina Demner-Fushman, Sophia Ananiadou, Makoto Miwa, Kirk Roberts, Junichi Tsujii
- Venues:
- BioNLP | WS
- SIG:
- SIGBIOMED
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 409–415
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.bionlp-1.32
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Rahmad Mahendra, Damiano Spina, Lawrence Cavedon, and Karin Verspoor. 2024. Do Numbers Matter? Types and Prevalence of Numbers in Clinical Texts. In Proceedings of the 23rd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, pages 409–415, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Do Numbers Matter? Types and Prevalence of Numbers in Clinical Texts (Mahendra et al., BioNLP-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.bionlp-1.32.pdf