Lexical Acquisition for Clinical Text Mining Using Distributional Similarity

John Carroll, Rob Koeling, Shivani Puri

Abstract: We describe experiments into the use of distributional similarity for acquiring lexical information from clinical free text, in particular notes typed by primary care physicians (general practitioners). We also present a novel approach to lexical acquisition from ‘sensitive’ text, which does not require the text to be manually anonymised – a very expensive process – and therefore allows much larger datasets to be used than would normally be possible.