Temporal Expressions in Swedish Medical Text – A Pilot Study
Sumithra Velupillai · 2014
One of the most important features of health care is to be able to follow a patient's progress over time and identify events in a temporal order.We describe initial steps in creating resources for automatic temporal reasoning of Swedish medical text.As a first step, we focus on the identification of temporal expressions by exploiting existing resources and systems available for English.We adapt the HeidelTime system and manually evaluate its performance on a small subset of Swedish intensive care unit documents.On this subset, the adapted version of Hei-delTime achieves a precision of 92% and a recall of 66%.We also extract the most frequent temporal expressions from a separate, larger subset, and note that most expressions concern parts of days or specific times.We intend to further develop resources for temporal reasoning of Swedish medical text by creating a gold standard corpus also annotated with events and temporal links, in addition to temporal expressions and their normalised values.