Disambiguation of Period Characters in Clinical Narratives

摘要

The period character's meaning is highly ambiguous due to the frequency of abbreviations that require to be followed by a period. We have developed a hybrid method for period character disambiguation and the identification of abbreviations, combining rules that explore regularities in the right context of the period with lexicon-based, statistical methods which scrutinize the preceding token. The texts under scrutiny are clinical discharge summaries. Both abbreviation detection and sentence delimitation showed an accuracy of about 93%. An error analysis demonstrated potential for further improvements.