Staggered NLP-assisted refinement for Clinical Annotations of Chronic Disease Events

Domain-specific annotations for NLP are often centered on real-world applications of text, and incorrect annotations may be particularly unacceptable. In medical text, the process of manual chart review (of a patient's medical record) is error-prone due to its complexity. We propose a staggered NLP-assisted approach to the refinement of clinical annotations, an interactive process that allows initial human judgments to be verified or falsified by means of comparison with an improving NLP system. We show on our internal Asthma Timelines dataset that this approach improves the quality of the human-produced clinical annotations.