Supporting the use of standardized nursing terminologies with automatic subject heading prediction: a comparison of sentence-level text classification methods

Hans Moen, Kai Hakala, Laura-Maria Peltonen, Henry Suhonen, Filip Ginter, Tapio Salakoski, Sanna Salanterä

Abstract: This study focuses on the task of automatically assigning standardized (topical) subject headings to free-text sentences in clinical nursing notes. The underlying motivation is to support nurses when they document patient care by developing a computer system that can assist in incorporating suitable subject headings that reflect the documented topics. Central in this study is performance evaluation of several text classification methods to assess the feasibility of developing such a system.