Task

SpRadIE targets Named Entity Recognition and Classification in the domain of radiology reports in Spanish, more concretely, ultrasounds.

Seven different classes of concepts in the radiology domain are distinguished. Since these entities refer to very precise, complex concepts, they are realized by correspondingly complex textual forms. Entities may be very long, sometimes even spanning over sentence boundaries, embedded within other entities of different types and may be discontinuous. Moreover, different text strings may be used to refer to the same entity, including abbreviations and typos.

The entity type Finding is particularly challenging, as it presents great variability in its textual forms. It ranges from a single word to more than 10 words in some cases, and comprising all kinds of phrases. However, this is also the most informative type of entity for the potential users of these annotations. Other challenging phenomena are the regular polysemy observed between Anatomical entities and Locations, and the irregular uses of Abbreviations. In the manual annotation process, we have found that human annotators differ more on those categories than on the others, thus we expect automatic annotators will also have difficulties to consistently classify those as well.

Examples

Entities are formed by a word or a sequence of words, not necessarily continuous, and entities can be embedded within other entities.

Linguistic Challenges

Disminución de tamaño a expensas predominantemente del lóbulo derecho.

(Decrease in size predominantly at the expense of the right lobe.)

Discontinuities

Embedded entities

Subordination and coordination

Systematic polysemy between Location and Anatomical Entity