=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1881/BARR2017_paper_3
|storemode=property
|title=A Proposed System to Identify and Extract Abbreviation Definitions in Spanish Biomedical Texts for the Biomedical Abbreviation Recognition and Resolution
(BARR) 2017
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1881/BARR2017_paper_3.pdf
|volume=Vol-1881
|authors=Christian Sánchez,Paloma Martínez
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/sepln/SanchezM17
}}
==A Proposed System to Identify and Extract Abbreviation Definitions in Spanish Biomedical Texts for the Biomedical Abbreviation Recognition and Resolution
(BARR) 2017==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1881/BARR2017_paper_3.pdf
A proposed system to identify and extract abbreviation
definitions in Spanish biomedical texts for the
Biomedical Abbreviation Recognition and Resolution
(BARR) 2017
Christian Sánchez, Paloma Martı́nez
Computer Science Department, Universidad Carlos III of Madrid Avd. Universidad, 30,
Leganés, 28911, Madrid, Spain
Abstract. Biomedical Abbreviation Recognition and Resolution (BARR) is an
evaluation track of the 2nd Human Language Technologies for Iberian languages
(IberEval) workshop, which is a workshop series organized by the Sociedad Española
del Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (SEPLN). In this first edition of BARR,
the focus is on the discovery of biomedical entities and abbreviation, and relat-
ing detected abbreviations with their long forms. This paper describes the system
and the approach presented in this track. We develop a ruled-based system us-
ing an adapted version of the algorithm for extraction of abbreviations and their
definitions from biomedical text proposed by Schwartz & Hearst.
1 Introduction
The interest in automatic text processing of biomedical documents has increased in the
last few years. There is some research that proposes certain solutions and approaches for
the problem of recognition and resolution of abbreviations, acronyms and symbols, but
most of it is focused on analyzing text written in English. In this context, the Biomedical
Abbreviation Recognition and Resolution (BARR) track asked the participants to test
and submit processing text systems that are able to analyze and extract occurrences of
abbreviation-definition pair in biomedical documents written in Spanish.
For our approach, and in line with other previous work and research, we refer to an
abbreviation as a Short Form (SF) and the definition as the Long Form (LF). For this
track, beside the mentioned elements, if a Short Form appears again in the text it is
considered or marked as Multiple, and if it is only an abbreviation without a definition
it is marked as Global.
This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes our proposed approach. Sec-
tion 3 presents evaluation and results. Finally, conclusions and future work are discussed
in Section 4.
2 Proposed Approach
As previously stated, our goal was to analyze documents written in Spanish in order to
extract abbreviations and definitions. To accomplish this, first, we assume that a Short
Form will be placed after the Long Form, i.e: [5]
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Evaluation of Human Language Technologies for Iberian Languages (IberEval 2017)
Las secuelas en la articulación temporomandibular (ATM)
In this example we consider ATM to be the abbreviation (Short Form) and artic-
ulación temporomandibular its definition (Long Form). The documents used for the
track contain a title and abstract; the analysis should be done in both.
Our system is based on the algorithm proposed by Schwartz et al., which is divided
into two main tasks. The first one is to identify the Short forms [5]:
Short forms are considered valid candidates only if they consist of at most
two words, their length is between two to ten characters, at least one of these
characters is a letter, and the first character is alphanumeric.
The second task is to identify candidates for the long forms. As explained in the men-
tioned paper, the long form must appear in the same sentence as the short form, it
should have no more than min(—A— + 5, —A— * 2) words, and composed of con-
tiguous words from the original text that include the word just before the short form.
When these tasks are completed, the main idea of the proposed algorithm is [5]:
Starting from the end of both the short form and the long form, move right
to left, trying find the shortest long form that matches the short form. Every
character in the short form must match a character in the long form, and the
matched characters in the long form must be in the same order as the charac-
ters in the short form. Any character in the long form can match a character
in the short form, with one exception: the match of the character at the begin-
ning of the short form must match a character in the initial position of the first
(leftmost) word in the long form (this initial position can be the first letter of a
word that is connected to other words by hyphens and other non- alphanumeric
characters).
Using the mentioned statements as guidelines, we divided the system process into
the following tasks:
2.1 Short Form Identification and Validation
The Short Form identification is performed using a set of rules and regular expressions.
The title and abstract are analyzed individually to get all the matches for any term
which complies with the criteria. Also its position in the text its extracted. At this point
the validation is performed with the use of regular expression and some pattern rules.
One of the regular expressions used was the following:
( [ A−Z ] { 2 , } [ \ − \ /A−Z0 −9]∗)\ b
It matches terms which contain at least 2 uppercase letters and could contain the
symbols (-, /) or any number. For example, in the following text:
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Antecedentes y objetivos. El Registro Informatizado de Enfermedad Tromboembólica
(RIETE) es un registro prospectivo que incluye de forma consecutiva pacientes
diagnosticados de enfermedad tromboembólica venosa. Hemos comparado la
presentación clı́nica y la respuesta al tratamiento anticoagulante en pacientes con
enfermedad tromboembólica venosa idiopática (ETEVI) versus secundaria (ETEVS,
asociada a algún factor de riesgo). Pacientes y métodos. Se analizaron las diferencias
en las caracterı́sticas clı́nicas,
The system will match the terms: RIETE, ETEVI, and ETEVS.
Also, and in difference with the based Schwartz et al. work, we estimated the length
of an abbreviation between 2 and 8 characters and used that as a pattern rule. To de-
termine this length we use as a reference a resource which contains Spanish Medical
Abbreviations: Diccionario de siglas médicas 1 . This estimation was made after an
analysis of the 3386 terms contained in the dictionary. First we obtained those terms
formed just by a word. This query matched 2676 terms, but in the results we got words
like: ’Arterioesclerosis’ which is not an abbreviation but a name of a disease. Then we
change the query to match all the terms starting with a least 2 capital letters. Applying
this criteria the documents matched were 2319 and we obtained terms like: ’AA’ which
have a few definitions ( Aminoácido, Anemia aplásica, Aorta abdominal ) or one of the
longest ’PETHEMA’ (Programa para el estudio de la terapéutica de las hemopatiı́as
malignas).
2.2 Short Form Extraction
Once the terms are identified, they are stored in two lists (title, abstract) with their posi-
tions in the text. Using the same text for the example above, the following demonstrates
how the system stores the results for the abstract analysis:
[
[0]: {
positions : [
[ 0 ] ” 82:87 ”
],
term : ” RIETE ”
},
[1]: {
positions : [
[0] ” 358:363 ” ,
[1] ” 626:631 ” ,
[2] ” 729:734 ” ,
[3] ” 798:803 ” ,
[4] ” 1130:1135 ” ,
[5] ” 1302:1307 ” ,
[6] ” 1729:1734 ”
1
http://sedom.es/diccionario/
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],
term : ”ETEVI”
},
[2]: {
positions : [
[0] ” 384:389 ” ,
[1] ” 634:639 ” ,
[2] ” 755:760 ” ,
[3] ” 865:870 ” ,
[4] ” 1001:1006 ” ,
[5] ” 1111:1116 ” ,
[6] ” 1253:1258 ” ,
[7] ” 1765:1770 ”
],
term : ”ETEVS”
},
]
As shown above, multiple matches of the same term are grouped as one record
in the list. This allows one to identify how many different terms are in the text. An
abbreviation could appear many times in a text. In this case the abbreviation that appears
together with a definition or Long Form is marked as the Short Form and the others are
marked as Multiple.
2.3 Long Form Identification and Validation
The Long Form identification is performed after the extraction of the Short Forms. Here
a similar approach as proposed by Schwartz is used. We take the position of each term
and evaluate the text from right to left. Each character of the term is used to find, for
instance, a word which starts with the same letter. If it does not match, a search inside
the word is performed to check if the word contains the letter. Stop Words, numbers
or any other non alphanumeric character are not take into account for this evaluation.
Once the number of matches in the text is equal to the length of the Long Form, the
system considers that it has a set of candidate words for the Long Form. The following
is an example for the extraction of the candidate words for the term ETEVI:
{
0: {
I : 1,
word : ” idiopatica ”
},
1: {
V: 1,
word : ” venosa ”
},
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2: {
E: 1,
T: 1,
word : ” tromboembolica ” :
},
3 {
E: 1,
word : ” enfermedad ”
}
}
Here, each letter of the term has a matched word. Notice that in the element with
the index ’2’, the word ”tromboembolica” has two matched letters: the letter (t) at the
beginning and (e) in the middle.
2.4 Long Form Extraction
With the list of word candidates, the system identifies the start position of the leftmost
word candidate and the end position of the rightmost candidate and extracts all of the
text contained between them. With this we can obtain also the stop words discarded in
the identification step. Once a Long Form is extracted the term is marked as the Long
Form and the other occurrences are marked as Multiple. If there were not candidate
words the system classified the term as Global.
3 Evaluation and results
For the BARR track, the participating systems are evaluated with the F1-micro measure.
There were two required submissions to evaluate : entity prediction and relation predic-
tion. Before evaluation the system was tested with the sample corpus to get a glimpse
on how to process the data. At first we noticed that the files needed to be treated with
an UTF-8 encoding, as is recommended when processing documents written in Span-
ish or other languages different than English. Here lies the main difference with our
approach and the one proposed by Schartz et al., because this subject is key for proper
data extraction and manipulation for this track.
The main programming language for the system is Perl. For the first processing
test a comma-separated values file manipulator module was used: Text::CSV 2 , mainly
because it could be easily configured to open and process tab-separated files, which is
the format for the datasets provided by the track. This module converts the bytes to
UTF-8 character equivalents by default. This behavior is fine for display compatibility
on different operative systems and language configurations, but it was identifying the
abbreviations and definitions in different positions than the labeled data provided by the
organizers. This is an example from the labeled sample dataset:
1741 es A 19 49 articulación temporomandibular LONG
2
https://metacpan.org/pod/Text::CSV
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When the system processed the same text, the followed result was obtained:
1741 es A 19 50 articulación temporomandibular LONG
Here, the last position is different due to the decoding of the accented vowel á, an
extra byte is added to create a valid UTF-8 char sequence. This behavior is explained in
the module documentation. One can deactivate this option and the bytes (and therefore
the length of the string) will not change. The results obtained for the system matched
with the labeled sample data, but a different issue emerged, as is shown in the following
example:
1741 es A 19 49 articulaci¡F3¿n temporomandibular LONG
Here the string stored in the file is not displayed correctly. The module tries to
convert the bytes to a valid ASCII character to be printed. In this case it is not possible
to convert the UTF-8 byte, then is replaced with the symbol ¡F3¿. The solution was to
relay in the Unicode encoding/decoding methods provided by the language itself. Perl
has the capacity to handle Unicode natively (3 ). We discarded the use of the module
mentioned before and handle all the file parsing and processing with the native I/O file
methods, divided every record in the dataset into fields (id, language, title, abstract)
to obtain the text to be processed. After this adjustment, the results were displayed
properly:
1741 es A 19 49 articulación temporomandibular LONG
Another encoding related issue we had to fix, were cases when a Long Form con-
tained vowels with accent in the candidate words. An example that illustrates this prob-
lem is the case with the term DMO. The system extracted this term in the following
text:
densidad mineral ósea (DMO)
The Long Form detection did not match the word ósea. The fix was to convert the
vowel in their not accented equivalent before the evaluation.
Once the mentioned issues were fixed, we could generate the entities and relations
predictions required by the track. To test the system performance we run an evaluation
with the sample dataset to compare the results with the other baselines used at the track.
We show the Entity and Relation Evaluation results compared in Table 1 and Table 2
respectively .
Tool Precision Recall F-Measure
Ab3P 78.20 39.87 52.81
ADRS 70.75 49.02 57.91
BADREX 72.50 37.91 49.78
Our System 83.67 53.59 65.33
Table 1 Results from Entity Evaluation
3
http://perldoc.perl.org/perluniintro.html
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Tool Precision Recall F-Measure
Ab3P 71.79 34.14 46.28
ADRS 62.26 40.24 48.89
BADREX 52.38 26.83 26.83
Our System 55.38 43.90 48.98
Table 2 Results from Relation Evaluation
Our system did not get good results for the Relation Evaluation, but it got best
results compared with the others in the Entity Evaluation. The results for the final sub-
mission are presented in Table 3.
Evaluation Precision Recall F-Score
Entity 70.69 73.47 72.05
Relation 72.20 61.78 66.59
Table 3 Final Submission Results
4 Conclusions and future work
In this paper we presented a rule based system for automatic detection and extraction
of abbreviations and their definitions. With the use of some pattern rules and regular
expressions and adapting a former proposed algorithm, we attained some results that
could be improved. Using Perl for text parsing provides a good performance. Using the
test dataset (20000 records) on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013) with a 2,4
GHz Intel Core i5 CPU and 8GB RAM, the estimated time to generate the entity predic-
tion file was 55s and for the relation prediction was 46s. One thing to notice is that our
system did not detect terms derived from Short Forms nor the Nested Relations, which
were one of the requirements for the predictions. This should be one of the possible
additions to improve the system.
When working with Spanish text, it is important to take into account the encoding
of the files. It could be a critical issue if it is not handled correctly. We noticed that after
implementing this helped to improved our results.
The system needs to be improved to detect Long Forms that could be at the right of
the abbreviation for example, given the following text:
ATM (Las secuelas en la articulación temporomandibular)
In this case, and contrary to our assumption in handling documents, the detection
pattern is Short Form ( Long Form ). There is room to improvement or different applica-
tions. Examples include using Machine Learning to classify abbreviations into different
tags in order to obtain the category of a document or as well another use case, gener-
ating abbreviations (short form) from a candidate definition (long form) and validate it
using a dictionary.
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