SDOH-NLI: a Dataset for Inferring Social Determinants of Health from Clinical Notes

Published: 07 Oct 2023, Last Modified: 01 Dec 2023EMNLP 2023 FindingsEveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Submission Type: Regular Short Paper
Submission Track: NLP Applications
Submission Track 2: Semantics: Lexical, Sentence level, Document Level, Textual Inference, etc.
Keywords: social determinants of health, natural language inference, nli, clinical notes, dataset
Abstract: Social and behavioral determinants of health (SDOH) play a significant role in shaping health outcomes, and extracting these determinants from clinical notes is a first step to help healthcare providers systematically identify opportunities to provide appropriate care and address disparities. Progress on using NLP methods for this task has been hindered by the lack of high-quality publicly available labeled data, largely due to the privacy and regulatory constraints on the use of real patients' information. This paper introduces a new dataset, SDOH-NLI, that is based on publicly available notes and which we release publicly. We formulate SDOH extraction as a natural language inference task, and provide binary textual entailment labels obtained from human raters for a cross product of a set of social history snippets as premises and SDOH factors as hypotheses. Our dataset differs from standard NLI benchmarks in that our premises and hypotheses are obtained independently. We evaluate both "off-the-shelf" entailment models as well as models fine-tuned on our data, and highlight the ways in which our dataset appears more challenging than commonly used NLI datasets.
Submission Number: 3835
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