International Journal of Computer Applications |
Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA |
Volume 186 - Number 41 |
Year of Publication: 2024 |
Authors: Vani K.B., Lokesh M.R. |
10.5120/ijca2024923999 |
Vani K.B., Lokesh M.R. . A Systematic Study on Extraction of Temporal Relation from Clinical Free Text. International Journal of Computer Applications. 186, 41 ( Sep 2024), 26-39. DOI=10.5120/ijca2024923999
Clinical Assessment and decision making mainly depends on Temporal Relations that exists between clinical event and activities of treatment prescribed. Temporal Relation extraction is a challenging task due to complexities associated with natural language processing techniques, representational ways for temporal data related to clinical activities, methodical approaches followed to extract temporal relations and temporal reasoning. In this work, we propose review of temporal relation extraction in clinical text. We analyzed around 118 articles via an exhaustive search of semanticscholar.org, PubMed, DBLP computer science Bibliography between 2018 to 2023. Relevant studies were made concerned to data sets and methodical approaches incorporated to extract temporal information. A thorough examination of selected papers was made to collect information on TLINK types, data sources, features selection methods used, DocTimeRel, Candidate pair generations and reported performance. Most state of the art is based on attention-based models, with contextualized word representations being fine-tuned for temporal relation extraction. Performance of Tlink extraction is dependent parameter of underlying mechanisms involved in temporal expression identification, temporal events recognitions and mechanisms used to extract temporal relations. F-score for identifying the temporal relation is observed to be in the range of 80% to 91.1%. Most works frequently used TLINKS are ‘before’, ‘after’, ‘overlap’ and ‘contains’ leaving a scope to extend the use of other TLINKS such as ‘started by’, ‘finished by’ ’precedes’ and so on. Machine learning based models and Deep learning-based models were the most commonly adopted techniques for extraction of temporal relations. Dataset Imbalance because of candidate pair generation and task complexity affects system’s performance leaving a scope for research. Most publications worked so far resides on same datasets, which shows a need for design of experiments on new kind of annotations.