Trove: Ontology-driven weak supervision for medical entity classification - Docwire News

MOTIVATION: Recognizing named entities (NER) and their associated attributes like negation are core tasks in natural language processing. However, manually labeling data for entity tasks is time consuming and expensive, creating barriers to using machine learning in new medical applications. Weakly supervised learning, which automatically builds imperfect training sets from low cost, less accurate labeling rules, offers a potential solution. Medical ontologies are compelling sources for generating labels, however combining multiple ontologies without ground truth data creates challenges due to label noise introduced by conflicting entity definitions. Key questions remain on the extent to which weakly supervised entity classification can be automated using ontologies, or how much additional task-specific rule engineering is required for state-of-the-art performance.