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Vol. 2 (2014)

TACL approved

Temporal Annotation in the Clinical Domain

Published 2014-04-30

  • William F. Styler IV
    • ,
  • Steven Bethard
    • ,
  • Sean Finan
    • ,
  • Martha Palmer
    • ,
  • Sameer Pradhan
    • ,
  • Piet C. de Groen
    • ,
  • Brad Erickson
    • ,
  • Timothy Miller
    • ,
  • Chen Lin
    • ,
  • Guergana Savova
    • ,
  • James Pustejovsky

William F. Styler IV
Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado at Boulder

Steven Bethard


Sean Finan
Children's Hospital Boston

Martha Palmer
Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado at Boulder

Sameer Pradhan
Children's Hospital Boston

Piet C. de Groen
The Mayo Clinic

Brad Erickson
The Mayo Clinic

Timothy Miller
Children's Hospital Boston

Chen Lin
Children's Hospital Boston

Guergana Savova
Children's Hospital Boston

James Pustejovsky
Brandeis University

Abstract

This article discusses the requirements of a formal specification for the annotation of temporal information in clinical narratives. We discuss the implementation and extension of ISO-TimeML for annotating a corpus of clinical notes, known as the THYME corpus. To reflect the information task and the heavily inference-based reasoning demands in the domain, a new annotation guideline has been developed, “the THYME Guidelines to ISO-TimeML (THYME-TimeML)”. To clarify what relations merit annotation, we distinguish between linguistically-derived and inferentially-derived temporal orderings in the text. We also apply a top performing TempEval 2013 system against this new resource to measure the difficulty of adapting systems to the clinical domain. The corpus is available to the community and has been proposed for use in a SemEval 2015 task. 

PDF (Presented at ACL 2014)

Author Biography

William F. Styler IV

Doctoral Candidate, University of Colorado Linguistics Department

Steven Bethard

Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham