Defining and Learning Refined Temporal Relations in the Clinical Narrative

Kristin Wright-Bettner, Chen Lin, Timothy A Miller, Steven Bethard, Dmitriy Dligach, Martha Palmer, James H. Martin, Guergana K Savova

Abstract:

We present refinements over existing temporal
relation annotations in the Electronic Medical
Record clinical narrative. We refined the
THYME corpus annotations to more faithfully
represent nuanced temporality and nuanced
temporal-coreferential relations. The main
contributions are in re-defining CONTAINS and
OVERLAP relations into CONTAINS,
CONTAINS-SUBEVENT, OVERLAP and
NOTED-ON. We demonstrate that these
refinements lead to substantial gains in
learnability for state-of-the-art transformer
models as compared to previously reported
results on the original THYME corpus. We thus
establish a baseline for the automatic extraction
of these refined temporal relations. Although
our study is done on clinical narrative, we
believe it addresses far-reaching challenges that
are corpus- and domain- agnostic.