Clinical XLNet-based End-to-End Knowledge Discovery on Clinical Text Data using Natural Language Processing

Abstract

A modern framework for assessing patient histories and conducting clinical research has been developed as the number of clinical narratives evolves. To discover the knowledge from such clinical narratives, clinical entity recognition and relation extraction tasks were performed subsequently in existing approaches, which resulted in error propagation. Therefore, a novel end-to-end clinical knowledge discovery strategy has been proposed in this paper. The clinical XLNet was used as a base model for handling the discrepancy issue. To predict the dependent clinical relation association, the multinomial Naïve Bayes probability function has been incorporated. In order to improve the performance of the proposed strategy, it takes into account entity pairs presented consecutively through the multi-head attention layer. Tests have been conducted using the N2C2 corpus, and the proposed methodology achieves a greater than 20% improvement in accuracy over existing neural network-based and transformer-based methods.