ליאור רוקח

Substantial electronically stored textual data such as clinical narratives reports often need to be retrieved to find relevant information for clinical and research purposes. The context of negation, a negative finding, is of special importance, since many of the most frequently described findings are such. Hence, when searching free-text narratives for patients with a certain medical condition, if negation is not taken into account, many of the documents retrieved will be irrelevant. We present a new cascaded pattern learning method for automatic identification of negative context in clinical narratives re-ports. Studying the training corpuses, the classification errors and patterns selected by the classifier, we noticed that it is possible to create a more powerful ensemble structure than the structure obtained from general-purpose ensemble method (such as Adaboost). We compare the new algorithm to previous methods proposed for the same task of similar medical narratives, and show its advantages: accuracy improvement compared to other machine learning methods, and much faster than manual knowledge engineering techniques with matching accuracy.