Does BERT need domain adaptation for clinical negation detection?

Abstract:

Introduction Classifying whether concepts in an unstructured clinical text are negated is an important unsolved task. New domain adaptation and transfer learning methods can potentially address this issue. Objective We examine neural unsupervised domain adaptation methods, introducing a novel combination of domain adaptation with transformer-based transfer learning methods to improve negation detection. We also want to better understand the interaction between the widely used bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) system and domain adaptation methods. Materials and Methods We use 4 clinical text datasets that are annotated with negation status. We evaluate a neural unsupervised domain adaptation algorithm and BERT, a transformer-based model that is pretrained on massive general text datasets. We develop an …