A Review of Recent Work in Transfer Learning and Domain Adaptation for Natural Language Processing of Electronic Health Records.

Objectives: We survey recent work in biomedical NLP on building more adaptable or generalizable models, with a focus on work dealing with electronic health record (EHR) texts, to better understand recent trends in this area and identify opportunities for future research.

Methods: We searched PubMed, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) anthology, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) proceedings, and Google Scholar for the years 2018-2020. We reviewed abstracts to identify the most relevant and impactful work, and manually extracted data points from each of these papers to characterize the types of methods and tasks that were studied, in which clinical domains, and current state-of-the-art results.

Rethinking domain adaptation for machine learning over clinical language.

Building clinical natural language processing (NLP) systems that work on widely varying data is an absolute necessity because of the expense of obtaining new training data. While domain adaptation research can have a positive impact on this problem, the most widely studied paradigms do not take into account the realities of clinical data sharing. To address this issue, we lay out a taxonomy of domain adaptation, parameterizing by what data is shareable.

From Characters to Time Intervals: New Paradigms for Evaluation and Neural Parsing of Time Normalizations.

This paper presents the first model for time normalization trained on the SCATE corpus. In the SCATE schema, time expressions are annotated as a semantic composition of time entities. This novel schema favors machine learning approaches, as it can be viewed as a semantic parsing task.