Building Resources For Vietnamese Clinical Text Processing

Abstract

Clinical texts contain textual data recorded by doctors during medical examinations. Sentences in clinical texts are generally short, narrative, notstrictly adhering to Vietnamese grammar and contain many medical terms which are not present in general dictionaries. In this paper, we investigate the tasks oflexical analysis and phrase chunking for Vietnam eseclinical texts. Although there exist several tools for general Vietnamese text analysis, these tools showeda limited quality in the clinical domain due to the specific grammatical style of clinical texts and the lack of medical vocabulary. Our main contributions are the construction of an annotated corpus (vnEMR) and lexical resources in the medical domain and in consequence theimprovement of the quality of the tools for clinical text analysis, including word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging and chunking.