Deep Learning for Punctuation Restoration in Medical Reports
Wael Salloum, Greg P. Finley, Erik Edwards, Mark A. Miller, David Suendermann‐Oeft · 2017
In clinical dictation, speakers try to be as concise as possible to save time, often resulting in utterances without explicit punctuation commands.Since the end product of a dictated report, e.g. an out-patient letter, does require correct orthography, including exact punctuation, the latter need to be restored, preferably by automated means.This paper describes a method for punctuation restoration based on a stateof-the-art stack of NLP and machine learning techniques including B-RNNs with an attention mechanism and late fusion, as well as a feature extraction technique tailored to the processing of medical terminology using a novel vocabulary reduction model.To the best of our knowledge, the resulting performance is superior to that reported in prior art on similar tasks.