SemClinBr - a multi-institutional and multi-specialty semantically annotated corpus for Portuguese clinical NLP tasks.

Background: The high volume of research focusing on extracting patient information from electronic health records (EHRs) has led to an increase in the demand for annotated corpora, which are a precious resource for both the development and evaluation of natural language processing (NLP) algorithms. The absence of a multipurpose clinical corpus outside the scope of the English language, especially in Brazilian Portuguese, is glaring and severely impacts scientific progress in the biomedical NLP field.

Methods: In this study, a semantically annotated corpus was developed using clinical text from multiple medical specialties, document types, and institutions.