Information Extraction from Electronic Medical Records Using Multitask Recurrent Neural Network with Contextual Word Embedding

Clinical named entity recognition is an essential task for humans to analyze large-scale electronic medical records efficiently. Traditional rule-based solutions need considerable human effort to build rules and dictionaries; machine learning-based solutions need laborious feature engineering. For the moment, deep learning solutions like Long Short-term Memory with Conditional Random Field (LSTM-CRF) achieved considerable performance in many datasets. In this paper, we developed a multitask attention-based bidirectional LSTM-CRF (Att-biLSTM-CRF) model with pretrained Embeddings from Language Models (ELMo) in order to achieve better performance. In the multitask system, an additional task named entity discovery was designed to enhance the model's perception of unknown entities. Experiments were conducted on the 2010 Informatics for Integrating Biology & the Bedside/Veterans Affairs (I2B2/VA) dataset. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art solution both on the single model and ensemble model. Our work proposes an approach to improve the recall in the clinical named entity recognition task based on the multitask mechanism.