Medical Entity Recognition: A Comparaison of Semantic and Statistical Methods

Medical Entity Recognition is a crucial step towards efficient medical texts analysis. In this paper we present and compare three methods based on domain-knowledge and machine-learning techniques. We study two research directions through these approaches: (i) a first direction where noun phrases are extracted in a first step with a chunker before the final classification step and (ii) a second direction where machine learning techniques are used to identify simultaneously entities boundaries and categories. Each of the presented approaches is tested on a standard corpus of clinical texts. The obtained results show that the hybrid approach based on both machine learning and domain knowledge obtains the best performance.