QA-based Event Start-Points Ordering for Clinical Temporal Relation Annotation

Seiji Shimizu, Lis Pereira, Shuntaro Yada, Eiji Aramaki


Abstract
Temporal relation annotation in the clinical domain is crucial yet challenging due to its workload and the medical expertise required. In this paper, we propose a novel annotation method that integrates event start-points ordering and question-answering (QA) as the annotation format. By focusing only on two points on a timeline, start-points ordering reduces ambiguity and simplifies the relation set to be considered during annotation. QA as annotation recasts temporal relation annotation into a reading comprehension task, allowing annotators to use natural language instead of the formalisms commonly adopted in temporal relation annotation. Based on our method, most of the relations in a document are inferable from a significantly smaller number of explicitly annotated relations, showing the efficiency of our proposed method. Using these inferred relations, we develop a temporal relation classification model that achieves a 0.72 F1 score. Also, by decomposing the annotation process into QA generation and QA validation, our method enables collaboration among medical experts and non-experts. We obtained high inter-annotator agreement (IAA) scores, which indicate the positive prospect of such collaboration in the annotation process. Our annotated corpus, annotation tool, and trained model are publicly available: https://github.com/seiji-shimizu/qa-start-ordering.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1171
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
13371–13381
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1171
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Seiji Shimizu, Lis Pereira, Shuntaro Yada, and Eiji Aramaki. 2024. QA-based Event Start-Points Ordering for Clinical Temporal Relation Annotation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 13371–13381, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
QA-based Event Start-Points Ordering for Clinical Temporal Relation Annotation (Shimizu et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1171.pdf