Fine-tuning BERT for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction in Chinese Medical Text

Abstract

Entity and relation extraction is the necessary step in structuring medical text. However, the feature extraction ability of the bidirectional long short term memory network in the existing model does not achieve the best effect. At the same time, the language model has achieved excellent results in more and more natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we present a focused attention model for the joint entity and relation extraction task. Our model integrates well-known BERT language model into joint learning through dynamic range attention mechanism, thus improving the feature representation ability of shared parameter layer. Experimental results on coronary angiography texts collected from Shuguang Hospital show that the F1-scores of named entity recognition and relation classification tasks reach 96.89% and 88.51%, which outperform state-of-the-art methods by 1.65% and 1.22%, respectively.