Towards the Inference of Social and Behavioral Determinants of Sexual Health: Development of a Gold-Standard Corpus with Semi-Supervised Learning.

Abstract

Social and behavioral determinants of health (SBDH) are environmental and behavioral factors that are increasingly recognized for their impact on health outcomes. We describe ongoing research to extract SBDH related to sexual health from clinical documentation. Our work addresses several challenges. First, there is no standard set of SBDHs for sexual health; we describe our curation of 38 such SBDHs. Second, it is unknown how SBDH related to sexual health are expressed in clinical notes; we detail the characteristics of an annotated corpus. Third, SBDH documentations are rare; we describe the use of semi-supervised learning to accelerate the annotation process by identifying notes likely to document SBDH. Fourth, we describe preliminary results to infer an array of SBDH from clinical documentation using supervised learning.