Generating a Distilled N-Gram Set
Effective Lexical Multiword Building in the SPECIALIST Lexicon
Chris J. Lu
1,2
, Destinee Tormey
1,2
, Lynn McCreedy
1,2
and Allen C. Browne
1
1
National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, U.S.A.
2
Medical Science & Computing, LLC, Rockville, MD, U.S.A.
Keywords: MEDLINE N-Gram Set, Multiwords, Medical Language Processing, Natural Language Processing, the
SPECIALIST Lexicon.
Abstract: Multiwords are vital to better Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems for more effective and efficient
parsers, refining information retrieval searches, enhancing precision and recall in Medical Language
Processing (MLP) applications, etc. The Lexical Systems Group has enhanced the coverage of multiwords in
the Lexicon to provide a more comprehensive resource for such applications. This paper describes a new
systematic approach to lexical multiword acquisition from MEDLINE through filters and matchers based on
empirical models. The design goal, function description, various tests and applications of filters, matchers,
and data are discussed. Results include: 1) Generating a smaller (38%) distilled MEDLINE n-gram set with
better precision and similar recall to the MEDLINE n-gram set; 2) Establishing a system for generating high
precision multiword candidates for effective Lexicon building. We believe the MLP/NLP community can
benefit from access to these big data (MEDLINE n-gram) sets. We also anticipate an accelerated growth of
multiwords in the Lexicon with this system. Ultimately, improvement in recall or precision can be anticipated
in NLP projects using the MEDLINE distilled n-gram set, SPECIALIST Lexicon and its applications.
1 INTRODUCTION
This section introduces: first, the SPECIALIST
Lexicon; second, the importance of multiwords in
NLP; third, the background and purpose of
developing a new n-gram-based system for building
lexical multiwords.
1.1 The SPECIALIST Lexicon
The SPECIALIST Lexicon, distributed in the Unified
Medical Language System (UMLS) Knowledge
Sources by the National Library of Medicine (NLM),
is a large syntactic lexicon of biomedical and general
English, designed and developed to provide the
lexical information needed for the SPECIALIST
Natural Language Processing System (McCray et al.,
1993). Lexical records are used for part-of-speech
(POS) tagging, indexing, information retrieval,
concept mapping, etc. in many NLP projects, such as
Lexical Tools (McCray et al., 1994), MetaMap
(Aronson, 2001; Aronson and Lang, 2010), cTAKES
(Savova, 2010), Sophia (Divita et al., 2014), gSpell
(Divita et al., 2000), STMT (Lu and Browne, 2012),
SemRep, UMLS Metathesaurus, ClinicalTrials.gov,
etc. It has been one of the richest and most robust NLP
resources for the NLP/MLP community since its first
release in 1994. It is important to keep the Lexicon up
to date with broad coverage to ensure the success of
NLP applications that use it.
Each lexical entry in the Lexicon records the
syntactic, morphological, and orthographic
information needed by the SPECIALIST NLP
System. Terms must meet 3 requirements to qualify
as lexical entries: 1) part-of-speech, 2) inflections,
and 3) a special unit of lexical meaning by
themselves. Linguists in the Lexical Systems Group
(LSG) look at the usage of candidate terms from
various sources to add terms into the Lexicon if the
above three requirements are met. Terms (base forms
and inflectional variants) may be single words or
multiwords - namely words that contain space(s). If it
is a multiword, such as “ice cream” orhot dog”, it is
called a lexical multiword (LexMultiword or LMW).
Single words in the Lexicon have increased 2.6 times
from 180,468 in 2002 to 468,655 in 2016. These
Lexicon single words cover only about 10.62% of
unigrams (single words) from titles and abstracts in
Lu C., Tormey D., McCreedy L. and Browne A.
Generating a Distilled N-Gram Set - Effective Lexical Multiword Building in the SPECIALIST Lexicon.
DOI: 10.5220/0006142000770087
In Proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2017), pages 77-87
ISBN: 978-989-758-213-4
Copyright
c
2017 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
77
MEDLINE.2016. However, single-word Lexicon
terms comprise 98.42% of MEDLINE unigrams if the
word count (WC) is taken into consideration. In other
words, the current Lexicon has a very high recall rate
of single words in MEDLINE, because most
frequently used single words in MEDLINE are
covered. As for LMWs, we observe a continuous
growth in the Lexicon from 88,324 (32.86%) in 2002
to 446,928 (48.81%) in 2016. Both the high coverage
of existing single words and the trend of increasing
growth of LMWs in the Lexicon lead to our position
that multiword acquisition is key for future Lexicon
building.
1.2 Multiwords in NLP
Multiwords are vital to the success of high quality
NLP applications (Sag et al., 2002; Fraser, 2009).
First, multiwords are ubiquitous. Technical
terminologies in many specialized knowledge
domains, particularly in areas like medicine,
computer science and engineering, are often created
as Multiword Expressions (MWEs) (Frantzi et al.,
2000; Green et al., 2013; Ramisch, 2014). Second,
MWEs are hard to deal with in NLP tasks, such as
identification, parsing, translation, and
disambiguation, not only because MWEs have a large
amount of distinct phenomena, but also due to the
absence of major syntactic theories and semantic
formalisms. Our Lexicon with multiwords remedies
these issues. For example, most NLP applications on
word segmentations are word-oriented
(tokenization), relying on POS taggers, stemmers,
and chunkers to segment each MWE as a phrasal unit
from the sentence. This process can be improved if
multiwords can be identified as a phrasal unit directly
(such as through a Lexicon lookup) and not processed
further by taggers, e.g. phrasal preposition (“because
of”, “due to”), and adverbs (“on time). Thus, POS
ambiguity can be reduced through identifying the
POS of these MWEs. Third, non-decomposable
MWEs, such as fixed phrases (“kingdom come”, “by
and large”) and idioms (kick the bucket”, “shoot the
breeze”), are very challenging tasks for NLP
syntactically as well as semantically. While syntactic
aspects of idiom usage necessitates a beyond-Lexical-
level solution to those non-decomposable MWEs,
fixed phrases are handled well as LMWs in our
Lexicon. NLP techniques, such as Query Expansion,
do not work well on fixed-phrase MWEs for concept
mapping, unless they are seen as LMWs. For
example, “hot dog” should not be expanded as “high
temperature canine” to find its concept. Instead, a
direct Lexicon look up of “hot dog” (E0233017)
without further query expansion resolves issues
caused by fixed-phrase MWEs. Furthermore, the
Metathesaurus concept associated with a sentence
often coincides with the longest multiword in the
sentence. This idea is implemented in MetaMap by
identifying the longest LMWs in sentences for
mapped concept ranking. Accordingly, a
comprehensive lexicon with a rich resource of MWEs
is an essential component to a more precise, effective,
and efficient NLP system.
1.3 MWEs and LMWs
Research on Multiword Expressions (MWEs) has
been growing since the late 1990s. State of the art
methods including statistical association measures
(Silva and Lopes, 1999; Fazly et al., 2009; Pecina,
2010), machine learning (Boukobza and Rappoport,
2009; Tsvetkov and Wintner, 2011; Green et al.,
2011), syntactic patterns (Seretan and Wehrli, 2009;
Kim and Baldwin, 2010; Green et al., 2013), web
queries (Takahashi and Morimoto, 2013), semantic
analysis (Pearce, 2001; Baldwin et al., 2003), and a
combination of the above methods (Calzolari et al.,
2002; Bejček et al., 2013; Sangati and Cranenburgh,
2015) are used in MWE research for acquisition,
identification, interpretation, disambiguation and
other applications. Despite a great deal of research on
MWEs, there is no approach that fits perfectly for
building LMWs in the SPECIALIST Lexicon. LMWs
are a subset of MWEs due to our requirements that a
legitimate Lexical entry must have a POS, inflections,
and be a unit of meaning. In short, the broader notion
of MWEs are distinguished from LWMs in four ways.
First, a collocation (an arbitrary statistically
significant association between co-occurring items) is
not necessarily a LMW because it is not necessarily
qualified as a Lexical entry. For example,
undergoing cardiac surgery” occurs frequently
(3,770 hits in 3,062 documents) in the 2016
MEDLINE n-gram set, but it is not a LMW because
it is not functioning as a special unit of meaning by
itself. Moreover, this collocation is sometimes, but
not always, a single POS. On the other hand, its
subterm, “cardiac surgery”, which occurs frequently
(37,171 hits in 22,404 documents) in MEDLINE, is a
LMW. In other words, frequency alone is not
sufficient to determine if a term is a LMW. For the
same reason, some phrases are not LMWs. For
example, “in the house” is not a LMW while “in
house” is. Second, verb particle constructions are
handled by complementation types (Browne et al.,
2000) in Lexical records to coordinate lexical
meaning with syntactic characteristics of the verb.
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For example, “beat someone up” can be constructed
from the Lexical record of “beat”, as shown in Figure
1. Similarly, light verbs that are covered within
Lexical records, such as “make love” and “give birth”,
are included in the Lexical records of “make
(E0038623) and “give” (E0029785), respectively.
The information on these types of MWEs is stored
inside the Lexical records and they are not considered
LMWs (not a base form or inflectional variants of a
Lexical entry). However, they can be
retrieved/identified by a parser based on the Lexicon.
Third, non-decomposable idioms are beyond the
scope of the Lexicon, such as “kick the bucket” and
shoot the breeze”. Aligning the syntactic analysis of
idiomatic phrases with their semantic interpretations
is beyond the scope of what a lexicon can accomplish.
Thus, they are not under consideration here. Fourth,
due to the complicated nature of multiwords, much
previous MWE research only focuses on bi-grams or
tri-grams, which do not meet the requirement of
including up to five-grams to reach an estimated
recall value of 99.47% of multiwords (Lu et al.,
2015).
{base=beat
entry=E0012175
cat=verb
variants=irreg|beat|beats|beat|beaten|beating|
intran
intran;part(about)
tran=np
tran=np;part(back)
tran=np;part(up)
tran=np;part(down)
tran=np;part(in)
link=advbl
cplxtran=np,advbl
nominalization=beating|noun|E0219216
}
Figure 1: Lexical record of the verb “beat”.
2 MOTIVATION
Previously, an element word approach (Lu et al.,
2014) was used to build the Lexicon by linguists
through a web-based computer-aided tool, LexBuild
(Lu et al., 2012). Unigrams with high frequency (WC)
from the MEDLINE n-gram set that are not in the
Lexicon were used as element words for finding new
LMW candidates through the Essie search engine (Ide
et al., 2007). There are several issues with this
approach: 1) it is time consuming; 2) multiwords
associated with high frequency element words do not
necessarily have high frequency; 3) new multiwords
associated with processed element words are missed.
If we use the mean value, 65%, as an estimated
multiword ratio based on the empirical measurement
(Ramisch, 2014), it will take more than 21 years for
current LSG staff to add all multiwords to the Lexicon
by this approach (on average, 20,000 terms are added
by LSG staff annually). And this estimate does not
account for the fact that many new multiwords are
continuously being created by biomedical researchers
and English users in general. Thus, we decided to
develop a new system to effectively build LMWs to
the Lexicon by using an n-gram approach. MEDLINE
was chosen as the corpus because it is the biggest and
most commonly used resource in the biomedical
domain. The MEDLINE n-gram set (MNS) was
generated by the following steps: 1) English titles and
abstracts from MEDLINE documents are collected
and then tokenized to sentences and words (tokens);
2) by requirements, the MNS includes up to 5-grams
with information of associated document count (DC)
and word count (WC); 3) n-gram and DC|WC are
used as key and values in Java HashMap class for n-
gram retrieval; 4) due to the large scale, the computer
program for retrieving n-grams exceeds the
maximum keys in the Java HashMap class (2
30
-1)
when n > 3. Thus, a new model is developed to
resolve this issue. This model involves processes of
splitting, grouping, filtering, combining and sorting
(Lu et al., 2015). The MNS is generated by above
processes and has been distributed annually to the
public since 2014. The MNS provides comprehensive
raw n-gram data from titles and abstracts of
MEDLINE. Due to its large-scale size (> 19M n-
grams), it is difficult to be handled by computer
programs with complicated algorithms. So, a distilled
MEDLINE n-gram set (DMNS), with reduced size,
higher precision and similar recall in terms of LMWs,
is required for the multiword acquisition task and
useful for NLP applications.
3 APPROACH - FILTERS
Filters (exclusive filters) are designed to be applied
on the MNS to generate the DMNS by trapping
invalid LMWs. The design goal of these filters is set
to keep the similar (high) recall rate by not trapping
valid LMWs. Ideally, all valid multiwords should
pass through these filters. The precision of the filtered
n-gram set can be improved significantly by applying
a series of filters with high recall rate. Exclusive
filters are developed based on empirical models with
heuristic rules in this task. They are categorized into
three types as described below. Patterns and trapped
Generating a Distilled N-Gram Set - Effective Lexical Multiword Building in the SPECIALIST Lexicon
79
examples are illustrated for each filter in the format
of [pattern] andexample” in this paper, respectively.
3.1 General Exclusive Filters
This type of filter is intuitive and based on surface
features of terms. Terms composed merely of certain
characters/words, such as punctuation, digits,
numbers, spaces and stopwords do not meet the
requirement of having a special unit of lexical
meaning to themselves. They are used for the general
purpose of filtering out invalid LMWs:
Pipe Filter: A term that contains pipe(s) is
trapped because a pipe is used as a field
separator in most NLP systems. Trapped
examples include: “(|r|”, “Ag|AgCl”, etc.
Punctuation or Space Filter: A term that
contains nothing but punctuation or space(s) is
trapped. Trapped examples include: “=”, “+/-“,
<”, “(%)” and “-->”.
Digit Filter: A term that contains nothing but
digit(s), punctuation, and space(s) is trapped.
Trapped examples include: “2000”, “95%”, “3-
5”, “$1,500”, “(+/10.05)”, “192.168.1.1” and
[192, 168]”.
Number Filter: A term that contains nothing but
number(s) is trapped. This filter can be
considered as a domain filter because all
numbers are already recorded in the Lexicon.
Trapped examples include: “two”, “first and
second”, “one third”,twenty-eight”, “Four
hundred and forty-seven” and “half”.
Digit and Stopword Filter: A term that contains
nothing but digit(s) or stopword(s) is trapped.
Trapped examples include: “50% of”, “of the”,
1, 2, and”, “2003 to 2007”, “for >=50%” and
OR-462”.
3.2 Pattern Exclusive Filters
This type of filter looks for certain matching patterns
in a term for trapping. Computer programs are
implemented based on observed empirical patterns.
Some filters require sophisticated algorithms.
Parenthetic Acronym Pattern (PAP) Filter: A
parenthetic acronym is a conventional way of
representing an acronym expansion with the
associated acronym. The pattern is an acronym
expansion followed by an acronym within a
closed parenthesis, e.g., [acronym-expansion
(ACRONYM)]. The expansions of acronyms
are usually valid multiwords. A term that
contains this pattern is trapped because it
contains a potential multiword plus the
associated acronym and thus cannot be a valid
LMW. Trapped examples include: “magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI)”, “imaging (MRI)”,
magnetic resonance (MR) imaging” and
(CREB)-binding protein (CBP)”.
Indefinite Article Filter: A lowercased term that
starts with an indefinite article and a space, [a ],
without other n-grams that match as its spelling
variants (spVar) pattern in the corpus (n-gram
set) is trapped. Patterns of [a-XXX] and [aXXX]
are used as the spVar pattern of indefinite
articles of [a XXX], where XXX represents any
term. Trapped examples include: “a
significant”, “a case”, “a case of”, “a dose-
dependent” and “a delivery rate per”.
UPPERCASE Colon Filter: A term that contains
the pattern of [UPPERCASE:] is trapped. In
MEDLINE, this is a conventional usage for this
pattern, such as [CONCLUSION:],
[RESULTS:], [OBJECTIVE:], [METHODS:],
[MATERIALS AND METHODS:], and
[BACKGROUND:]. Trapped examples include
MATERIALS AND METHODS: The”, “95%
CI:” and “PHPT:
Disallowed Punctuation Filter: A term that
contains disallowed punctuation is trapped.
Disallowed punctuation includes:
{}_!@#*\;"?~=|<>$`^. Trapped examples
include: “(n =”, “(P < 0.05)”, “N^N”, “group
(n=6) received” and “CYP3A7*1C”.
Measurement Pattern Filter: A term that
contains a measurement pattern is trapped. A
measurement pattern is [number + unit],
including age (“4-year-old”, “4 year-old”, “four
year-old”, “4 year-olds” and “4 years or older
with”), time (“four months
”, “1 January 1991”,
“from May 2002” and “6 hours plus”), range
(“2-3 days” and1-2 tablets”), temperature (“at
-5 degrees”), dosage (“10 cigarettes per day
and “0.1-2.3 mg/day”) and others (“60 inches”,
0.5 mg”, “3 mg/EE”, “10 mg/kg” and “50
mg/kg/day”).
Incomplete Pattern Filter: A term that contains
an incomplete pattern is trapped. A valid
multiword should have completed parentheses
or brackets. Incomplete patterns are terms that
do not have an even number of left and right
parentheses or square brackets or they are not
closed. Trapped examples include: “II (Hunter
syndrome”, “0.05) higher”, “bond]C-C[triple”,
(chi(2)” and “interval [95%”.
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3.3 Lead-End-Term Exclusive Filters
LMWs do not start with certain terms, such as
auxiliaries (“be”, “do”, etc.), complementizers
(“that”), conjunctions (“and”, “or”, “but”, etc.),
determiners (“a”, “the”, “some”, etc.), modals
(“may”, “must”, “can”, etc.), pronouns (“it”, “he”,
they”, etc.), and prepositions (“to”, “on”, “by”, etc.).
They are called invalid lead-terms. Similarly,
multiwords do not end with words in the above-listed
categories. N-grams ending in them are invalid
LMWs. They are used in exclusive filters to exclude
invalid multiwords. Terms from the Lexicon with any
of the above seven categories are used as invalid lead-
end-term (ILET) candidates. ILETs only comprise
0.05% (488) of total forms in Lexicon.2016
(915,583). Notably, ILET candidates are considered
static because no new terms in the above 7 categories
have been added since 2010. Please refer to LSG web
documents on Lead-End-Term filter models for
details (National Library of Medicine, Lexicon: Lead-
End-Terms Model, 2015).
Absolute Invalid Lead-Term Filter: A term that
leads with an absolute invalid lead-term (AILT)
is trapped. There are 382 AILTs derived from
the Lexicon, such as [the], [from], [is] and [of].
Trapped examples include: “The results”, “from
the”, “is a” and “of a”.
Absolute Invalid End-Term Filter: A term that
ends with an absolute invalid end-term (AIET)
is trapped. There are 407 AIETs derived from
the Lexicon, such as [with], [the] and [that].
Trapped examples include: “patients with”, “at
the” and “suggest that”.
Lead-End-Term Filter: A term that leads with an
ILET and also ends with an ILET is trapped.
Trapped examples include: “in a”, “to be”, “with
a” and “as a”.
Lead-Term No SpVar Filter: A term that leads
with a valid lead-term (VLT) without any other
term matching its spVar pattern in the same
corpus is trapped. There are 52 VLTs derived
from the Lexicon, such as [to], [as], [for] and
[plus]. Trapped examples include: to
determine”, “as a result”, “for example” and
plus LHRH-A”.
End-Term No SpVar Filter: A term that ends
with a valid end-term (VET) without any other
term matching its spVar pattern in the same
corpus is trapped. There are 27 VETs derived
from the Lexicon, such as [of], [to], [in] and
[more]. Trapped examples include:effects of”,
was used to”, “(HPV) in” and “loss of two or
more”.
4 TESTS AND RESULTS
The evaluation of each individual filter, the
combination of all filters, and the distilled MEDLINE
n-gram set are discussed in this section. The 2016
release of the Lexicon and MEDLINE n-gram set are
used in this paper, unless specified otherwise.
4.1 Recall Test of Filters
A recall test model has been established for testing
each developed filter individually. Recall is defined
as: TP / (TP + FN), where T is true, F is false, P is
positive, N is negative. Terms (915,583) in the
Lexicon are used to test exclusive filters. All Lexicon
terms are valid (relevant) and should pass through
filters for preserving high recall rate. In this test, the
pass-through terms are counted as TP (retrieved,
relevant) while the trapped terms are FN (not
retrieved, relevant) for the filtered set.
Columns 4 and 5 in Table 1 list the recall rate and
number of trapped terms (FN) for this recall test. The
results show that all filters meet the design goal to
have very high recall rates. The lowest recall rate
(99.9913%) is at filter 15, Lead-Term No SpVar
Filter.
4.2 The Distilled N-gram Set
The distilled MEDLINE n-gram set is generated by
applying these high recall filters to the MEDLINE n-
gram set in the same sequential order of the first
column (ID) in Table 1. Let’s say X filters are applied
to all MEDLINE n-grams. The number of valid
LMWs (TP) and number of invalid LMWs (FP) of the
filtered MEDLINE n-gram set after ith filter are TP
i
and FP
i
, respectively, where i = 0, 1, 2, … X. The
number of valid LMWs are about the same (TP
0
TP
1
TP
2
≅ TP
X
) if high recall filters are used.
The number of invalid LMWs is reduced (FP
0
> FP
1
> FP
2
> … > FP
X
) from the original MEDLINE n-
gram set to the final distilled MEDLINE n-gram set
after applying filters. Accordingly, the distilled
MEDLINE n-gram set (X) has higher precision P
X
and similar recall R
X
to the MEDLINE n-gram set (0),
as shown in equations 1 and 2, respectively, where the
number of FN
i
(not retrieved, relevant) is a constant.
P
X
= TP
X
/ (TP
X
+ FP
X
)≅ TP
0
/ (TP
0
+ FP
X
)
> TP
0
/ (TP
0
+ FP
0
) (1)
R
X
= TP
X
/ (TP
X
+ FN
X
) = TP
X
/ (TP
X
+ FN
0
)
≅ TP
0
/ (TP
0
+ FN
0
) (2)
Generating a Distilled N-Gram Set - Effective Lexical Multiword Building in the SPECIALIST Lexicon
81
Sixteen high recall rate filters are applied to the
MEDLINE n-gram set in the same sequential order as
the first column in Table 1 to filter out invalid LMWs.
Columns 6, 7 and 8 in Table 1 list the number of
trapped terms, the passing rate (PR) and cumulative
passing rate (cum. PR) for all filters applied on the
MEDLINE n-gram set. The passing rate of the ith
filter is the pass through terms/total terms when
applying the ith filter on the MNS individually. The
pass through terms equals the total terms minus the
trapped terms. The cum. PR of ith filter is the
cumulative passing rate after applying i filters in the
sequential order of the first column in Table 1 to the
MNS. In other words, the trapped number is the sum
of trapped terms by filters that apply before the ith
filter. As a result (i = 16), the distilled MEDLINE n-
gram set, after filtering out the majority (11,922,490)
of invalid LMWs by these 16 filters, contains about
38.31% (7,402,848) n-grams of the MEDLINE n-
gram set (19,325,338). Figure 2 shows a schematic
diagram for generating the distilled MNS by applying
these filters on the MNS. These filters are designed
to independently trap invalid lexMultiwords, so the
order of filter application does not affect the final
results. These filters are generic and can be used by
different NLP projects if they meet the project
requirements. The Lead-End-Term filters (ID: 12-16)
have higher efficiency (trapped terms/total terms) by
trapping more n-grams in this process while the recall
rate is above 99.99%. Theoretically, the distilled
MEDLINE n-gram set, preserves valid terms in the
MNS and thus has higher precision and similar recall
compared to the MNS. The size of DMNS is reduced
to 38% of MNS, making it possible for complicated
computer programs to work in a reasonable time
frame in practice, such as the SpVar Pattern matcher
(please see section 5.1).
Table 1: Results of applying exclusive filters on Lexicon recall test and the MEDLINE n-gram set.
ID Filter Type Filter Name
Lexicon Recall Test Applied on the MEDLINE N-gram Set
Recall Trapped Trapped PR Cum. PR
1
General
Filters
Pipe 100.0000% 0 7 100.0000% 100.0000%
2 Punctuation or Space 100.0000% 0 425 99.9978% 99.9978%
3 Digit 99.9999% 1 132,650 99.3136% 99.3114%
4 Number 99.9953% 43 4,326 99.9775% 99.2890%
5 Digit and Stopword 99.9991% 8 157,786 99.1777% 98.4725%
6
Pattern
Filters
Parenthetic Acronym -
(ACR)
100.0000% 0 197,022 98.9647% 97.4530%
7 Indefinite Article 99.9986% 13 344,403 98.1713% 95.6709%
8 UPPERCASE Colon 99.9999% 1 113,936 99.3838% 95.0813%
9 Disallowed Punctuation 99.9986% 13 135,508 99.2625% 94.3801%
10 Measurement 99.9920% 73 336,112 98.1572% 92.6409%
11 Incomplete 100.0000% 0 166,356 99.0708% 91.7801%
12
Lead-End-
Term
Filters
Absolute Invalid Lead-
Term
99.9943% 52 4,712,162 73.4329% 67.3967%
13
Absolute Invalid End-
Term
99.9997% 3 2,710,470 79.1897% 53.3713%
14 Lead-End-Term 99.9992% 7 2,687 99.9739% 53.3573%
15 Lead-Term No SpVar 99.9913% 80 1,450,394 85.9342% 45.8522%
16 End-Term No SpVar 99.9968% 29 1,458,246 83.5433% 38.3064%
Figure 2: Schematic diagram of the MNS, filters and the distilled MNS.
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82
4.3 Evaluation of DMNS
We further verify the DMNS by comparing the
performance of the MNS and the DMNS. A smaller
test set is set up by retrieving LMW candidates from
the Parenthetic Acronym Pattern (PAP) matcher.
Matchers (inclusive filters) are designed to retrieve
LMWs from MEDLINE n-grams by trapping valid
multiwords that match valid LMW patterns. In other
words, terms trapped by matchers should be valid
LMWs. The design goal of matchers is set to generate
high precision LMW candidates. On the other hand,
the recall of matchers might decrease because not all
valid LMWs are trapped.
Acronym expansions are good patterns for a
matcher because they have a high possibility of
generating valid LMWs. The PAP matcher model is
implemented as follows. First, apply Parenthetic
Acronym Pattern Filter on the MEDLINE n-gram set
to retrieve terms matching the pattern of [acronym
expansion (ACRONYM)]. For example, “computed
tomography (CT)”, “magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI)”, “Unified Health System (SUS)”, etc. are
retrieved from the n-gram set. Second, retrieve
expansions if they match the associated acronym.
Heuristic rules are implemented, such as checking the
initial characters of first and last words of the
expansion to match the first and last characters of the
associated acronym. For example, the expansion of
Unified Health System (SUS)” is identified as an
invalid LMW because the first initial of the expansion
(U) does not match the first character of acronym (S).
Third, remove terms if the expansion is a subterm of
other expansions in the list. For example, both n-
grams of “cell sarcoma (CCA)“ and “clear cell
sarcoma (CCA)” pass the first two steps. The invalid
LMW of “cell sarcoma” is removed in this step
because it is a subterm of the valid LMW “clear cell
sarcoma”.
We applied the PAP matcher to the MNS to
retrieve LMW candidates. The lowercased core-terms
of these candidates are collected as the test set. Core-
term normalization is to normalize an n-gram to its
core form by stripping the leading and ending
punctuation. For example, “in details,”, “- in details”
and “- in details,” have the same core-term form of
“in details”. Core-terms might have punctuation
internally, such as "in (5) details". It is a useful
normalization to cluster terms with the same core
together from the n-gram set in multiword
acquisition. As a result, 17,707 LMW candidates are
retrieved by this process. They are tagged by LSG
linguists and are added to the Lexicon if they are valid
LMWs. 15,850 candidates in this set are tagged as
valid LMWs to reach 89.51% precision for this PAP
matcher, where precision is defined as: TP/(TP+FP),
as shown in case 1 in Table 2. The recall cannot be
found because all LMWs from MEDLINE cannot be
identified in real practice. The result of this PAP
matcher is used as the baseline for performance test
to compare the results of other filters and matchers.
Accordingly, recall in case 1 is set to 1.00 for the
purpose of comparison. F1 score is defined as: (2 x
precision x recall) / (precision + recall), is calculated
and shown in the last column in Table 2.
We repeat the same process by applying the PAP
matcher to the DMNS to retrieve LMWs. The results
(case 2) show an improvement on F1 score with better
precision and almost the same recall. This confirms
the theoretic conclusion and the result of the recall
test on these filters, that the distilled MEDLINE n-
gram contains almost the same amount of valid
multiwords as the MEDLINE n-gram set while its
size is reduced to 38%. Furthermore, the cumulative
recall rates of these 16 filters on the recall test
(0.9996, multiple product of recall column in table 1)
and the recall rate of case 2 in Table 2 (0.9994) are
almost identical. This confirms that the approach of
applying these filters results in a similarly high recall
rate for both the Lexicon and the test set from PAP
matcher. Similar results of the Lexicon recall test and
DMNS in Table 1 and the performance test of the
PAP matcher on the MNS and the DMNS in Table 2
for 3 releases (2014 to 2016) of the Lexicon and
MEDLINE are found to confirm the consistency of
this approach.
Table 2: Performance comparison of MNS, DMNS and SVP matchers on a test set with 17,707 terms.
Case Test Case - Model TP FP FN TN Precision Recall F1
1 PAP matcher on MNS (baseline) 15,850 1,857 0 0 0.8951 (1.0000) 0.9447
2 PAP matcher on DMNS (16 filters) 15,840 1,299 10 558 0.9242 0.9994 0.9603
3 SVP matcher on case 2 8,094 499 7,756 1,358 0.9419 0.5107 0.6623
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5 APPLICATIONS ON DMNS
Despite the high precision of the PAP matcher, it only
retrieves a small amount of LMW candidates. Other
matchers have been developed to retrieve more LMW
candidates for Lexicon building.
5.1 Spelling Variant Pattern Matcher
The Spelling Variant Pattern (SVP) matcher model
with a complicated algorithm was developed to
retrieve large amount of LMW candidates. As we
observed, an n-gram is a good LMW candidate if it
has spelling variants existing in the same corpus (n-
gram set). A sophisticated computer algorithm was
developed to identify all n-grams that have potential
spVars. First, a special normalization program was
developed to normalize spVars into their canonical
forms by converting non-ASCII Unicode to ASCII
(e.g. “Labbé” to “Labbe”), synonym substitution (e.g.
St. Anthony's fire” to “Saint Anthony's fire”), rank
substitution (e.g. Vth nerve” to “5th nerve”), number
substitution (e.g. “12-lead” to “twelve-lead”), Roman
numeral substitution (e.g. “BoHV-I” to “BoHV-1”),
strip punctuation (e.g. “lamin-A” to “lamin A”),
stripping genitive (e.g.Laufe's forceps” to “Laufe
forceps”), converting to lowercase, and removing any
space(s). All terms that have the same normalized
spVar canonical form are identified as spVars to each
other. The Lexicon.2015 has 379,269 spVars
(including inflectional spelling variants) in 867,728
(unique) inflectional variants, and was used to test
this model. As shown in the recall column in Table 3,
80.50% of all spVars in the Lexicon are identified by
spVar normalization (step 1). All identified spVars
are grouped in spVar classes for further NLP
processing. Second, a MES (Metaphone, Edit
distance, and Sorted distance) model is developed to
improve recall. The MES model is composed of an
algorithm of Metaphone phonetic code (Philips,
1990), edit distance (the minimum number of
operations required to transform one term into the
other), and minimum sorted distance. Sorted distance
is the distance between two terms in an alphabetic
sorted list of a set of terms. It is used to measure the
similarity of two terms compared to other terms in the
set. All terms having the same phonetic code and an
edit distance (ED) less than a specified value are
collected and sorted. The pair with the minimum
sorted distance (the closest pair) is identified as
spVars to each other. For example, “yuppie flu” and
yuppy flu” have different spVar canonical forms of
yuppieflu” and “yuppyflu”, respectively, and thus are
not identified as spVars in the step 1, normalization.
They are identified as spVars in step 2 (MES model),
because they have the same Metaphone code of
[YPFL], edit distance of 2, and the minimum sorted
distance. This step identifies more spVars that cannot
be identified by normalization in step 1. The recall is
increased to 97.92% (Table 3). Third, an ES (Edit
distance and Sorted distance) model is developed for
further improvement of recall. Terms with an edited
distance less than a specified value are collected and
sorted. The pair with the minimum sorted distance is
identified as being spVars. For example, “zincemia
and “zincaemia” are identified as spVars by the ES
model with an edit distance of 1, while they were not
identified as spVars in the previous steps, because
they have different spVar canonical forms of
zincemia” and “zincaemia” and also have different
Metaphone codes of [SNSM] and [SNKM],
respectively. By relaxing the value of edit distance in
both models repeatedly, our program reaches 99.72%
recall on spVar identification in six steps in this test,
as shown in Table 3. Precision (Prec.), recall, F1,
accuracy, and running time (RT) of each step in this
SVP matcher model are shown in Table 3, where
accuracy is defined as: (TP + TN) / (TP + FP + FN +
TN).
For testing purposes, we applied this SVP matcher
model to the test set from the PAP matcher (case 2 in
Table 2). The results indicate improvement in
precision while recall dropped, as shown in case 3 in
Table 2. This confirms the design characteristics of
matchers.
Table 3: Performance analysis of the SVP matcher model.
Step Algorithm ED TP FP FN TN Prec. Recall F1 Accuracy RT
1 SpVarNorm N/A 305,309 3,495 73,960 484,964 0.9887 0.8050 0.8874 0.9107 1 min
2 MES 2 371,385 156,648 7,884 331,811 0.7033 0.9792 0.8187 0.8104 7 hr
3 ES 1 376,646 270,881 2,623 217,578 0.5817 0.9931 0.7336 0.6848 23 hr
4 MES 3 377,004 285,046 2,265 203,413 0.5694 0.9940 0.7241 0.6689 8 min
5 ES 2 378,134 337,461 1,135 150,998 0.5284 0.9970 0.6907 0.6098 26 hr
6 MES 4 378,211 340,105 1,058 148,354 0.5265 0.9972 0.6892 0.6068 2 min
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The next step is to apply this SVP matcher model
to the MNS to generate LMW candidates from
MEDLINE. The running time of this model on the
Lexicon took over 56 hours (sum of the RT column
in Table 3) even with a powerful computer with 192
GB memory. The running time will be exponentially
increased when applying the SVP model on the MNS,
which is over 22 times the size of the Lexicon. This
is impractical and not feasible in real practice. Thus,
the smaller size (38%) DMNS is chosen as input to
replace the MNS for reducing the processing time
without sacrificing recall. Further purification
processes of core-term normalization and frequency
threshold restriction (WC > 150) are also applied to
reduce the size of the n-gram set for better
performance. As a result, 752,920 spVars in 269,871
spVar classes are identified by running this computer
program for 20 days and are used for LMWs building
in the SPECIALIST Lexicon.
5.2 More Filters and Matchers
Other filters and matchers have also been developed
to apply to the DMNS to further improve LMW
building. For example, domain filters exclude terms
that are in a certain domain, such as single word,
frequency, and existing in the current Lexicon.
By requirement, a valid LMW must have a
meaning. Thus, a term with valid concept(s) has a
better possibility of being a valid LMW. We utilized
UMLS Metathesaurus concepts to create one such
matcher, the Metathesaurus CUI Pattern (MCP)
matcher. The Synonym Mapping Tool (SMT) in
STMT (Lu and Browne, 2012) is used to retrieve
Metathesaurus concepts (CUIs) in this model to
generate LMW candidates. The SMT is set up to find
concepts within 2 subterm substitutions by their
synonyms. The default synonym list in SMT is used.
In addition, an End-Word Pattern (EWP) matcher was
also developed. In the biomedical domain,
multiwords often end with certain words (End-
Words), such as [syndrome] (e.g. “migraine
syndrome”, “contiguous gene syndrome”), [disease]
(e.g. “Fabry disease”, “Devic disease”), and so on.
An End-Word candidate list composed of the top 20
frequency End-Words for LMWs has been derived
from the Lexicon. These End-Words are used in the
EWP matcher to retrieve LMW candidates.
The combining of filters and matchers improves
precision. This work focuses on generating high
precision LMW candidates for effective LMW
building. On the other hand, the recall of the matchers
is not emphasized because there are too many
multiwords yet to be found.
6 CONCLUSIONS
A set of high recall rate filters has been developed.
These filters are used to derive the distilled
MEDLINE n-gram set, resulting in reducing its size
to 38%, with better precision and similar recall to that
of the MEDLINE n-gram set. These filters and the
distilled n-gram set have been tested against the
Lexicon and a test set of terms retrieved from MNS
by PAP matchers. The distilled MEDLINE n-gram
set is needed for further NLP processes with
complicated algorithms, such as the SVP matcher
model, to reduce the running time for retrieving more
LMW candidates for Lexicon building.
Other matchers have also been developed and
evaluated. Combinations of filters and matchers have
been used to generate high precision LMW
candidates for effectively building the Lexicon. The
LSG plans to continuously enhance and develop
filters and matchers for further improvement. The
filters and matchers we have developed are generic
and can be used independently or in combination for
different research purposes. The approach of
generating the distilled MEDLINE n-gram set is also
generic and can be applied to other n-gram sets for
reducing size and better precision without sacrificing
recall. Most importantly, this approach provides a
modular and extendable framework for more and
better filters and matchers for LMW acquisition and
NLP research.
Multiwords are pervasive, challenging and vital in
NLP. The LSG aims to provide a lexicon with high
coverage of multiwords matching that of single
words. We believe the impact of enriched multiword
acquisition will enhance the precision, recall, and
naturalness of NLP applications. The SPECIALIST
Lexicon, the MEDLINE n-gram set and the distilled
MEDLINE n-gram set (National Library of Medicine,
Lexicon: The MEDLINE n-gram set, 2016) are
distributed by the National Library of Medicine
(NLM) annually via an Open Source License
agreement.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research was supported by the Intramural
Research Program of the NIH, National Library of
Medicine. The authors would like to thank Mr. Guy
Divita for his valuable discussions and suggestions.
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85
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