Fusing Label Relations for Chinese EMR Named Entity Recognition with Machine Reading Comprehension

Chinese electronic medical records named entity recognition (NER) is a core task in medical knowledge mining, which is usually viewed as a sequence labeling problem. Recent works introduce the machine reading comprehension (MRC) framework into this task and extract named entities in a question-answering manner, resulting in state-of-the-art performance. However, they extract entities of different types independently, ignoring the fact that entities presented in the context might highly correlate with each other. To address this issue, we extend the MRC-based model and propose Fusion Label Relations with MRC (FLR-MRC). The method implicitly models the relations between labels through graph attention networks and fuse label information with text for named entity recognition. Experimental results on the benchmark datasets CMeEE and CCKS2017-CNER demonstrate FLR-MRC outperform existing clinical NER methods, with F1-score reaching 0.6652 and 0.9101, respectively.