A Multi-Task Learning Framework for Chinese Medical Procedure Entity Normalization

Abstract

Medical entity normalization is a fundamental task in medical natural language processing and clinical applications. The task aims to map medical mentions to standard entities in a given knowledge base. In this paper, we focus on Chinese medical procedure entity normalization. This task brings an extra multi-implication challenge that a mention may link to multiple standard entities. To perform the task, we propose a novel deep neural multi-task learning framework to jointly model implication number prediction and entity normalization. Our model utilizes the multi-head attention mechanism to provide mutual benefits between the two tasks. Experimental results show that our method achieves comparable performance compared with the baseline methods.