Temporal Relation Extraction in Clinical Texts: A Span-based Graph Transformer Approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Chaturvedi, Rochana, Baghershahi, Peyman, Medya, Sourav, Di Eugenio, Barbara
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Chaturvedi, Rochana
Baghershahi, Peyman
Medya, Sourav
Di Eugenio, Barbara
author_facet Chaturvedi, Rochana
Baghershahi, Peyman
Medya, Sourav
Di Eugenio, Barbara
contents Temporal information extraction from unstructured text is essential for contextualizing events and deriving actionable insights, particularly in the medical domain. We address the task of extracting clinical events and their temporal relations using the well-studied I2B2 2012 Temporal Relations Challenge corpus. This task is inherently challenging due to complex clinical language, long documents, and sparse annotations. We introduce GRAPHTREX, a novel method integrating span-based entity-relation extraction, clinical large pre-trained language models (LPLMs), and Heterogeneous Graph Transformers (HGT) to capture local and global dependencies. Our HGT component facilitates information propagation across the document through innovative global landmarks that bridge distant entities. Our method improves the state-of-the-art with 5.5% improvement in the tempeval $F_1$ score over the previous best and up to 8.9% improvement on long-range relations, which presents a formidable challenge. We further demonstrate generalizability by establishing a strong baseline on the E3C corpus. This work not only advances temporal information extraction but also lays the groundwork for improved diagnostic and prognostic models through enhanced temporal reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_18085
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Temporal Relation Extraction in Clinical Texts: A Span-based Graph Transformer Approach
Chaturvedi, Rochana
Baghershahi, Peyman
Medya, Sourav
Di Eugenio, Barbara
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
I.2.7; I.2.1; J.3
Temporal information extraction from unstructured text is essential for contextualizing events and deriving actionable insights, particularly in the medical domain. We address the task of extracting clinical events and their temporal relations using the well-studied I2B2 2012 Temporal Relations Challenge corpus. This task is inherently challenging due to complex clinical language, long documents, and sparse annotations. We introduce GRAPHTREX, a novel method integrating span-based entity-relation extraction, clinical large pre-trained language models (LPLMs), and Heterogeneous Graph Transformers (HGT) to capture local and global dependencies. Our HGT component facilitates information propagation across the document through innovative global landmarks that bridge distant entities. Our method improves the state-of-the-art with 5.5% improvement in the tempeval $F_1$ score over the previous best and up to 8.9% improvement on long-range relations, which presents a formidable challenge. We further demonstrate generalizability by establishing a strong baseline on the E3C corpus. This work not only advances temporal information extraction but also lays the groundwork for improved diagnostic and prognostic models through enhanced temporal reasoning.
title Temporal Relation Extraction in Clinical Texts: A Span-based Graph Transformer Approach
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
I.2.7; I.2.1; J.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18085