Named Entity Recognition Using BERT BiLSTM CRF for Chinese Electronic Health Records

As the generation and accumulation of massive electronic health records (EHR), how to effectively extract the valuable medical information from EHR has been a popular research topic. During the medical information extraction, named entity recognition (NER) is an essential natural language processing (NLP) task. This paper presents our efforts using neural network approaches for this task. Based on the Chinese EHR offered by CCKS 2019 and the Second Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University (SAHSU), several neural models for NER, including BiLSTM, have been compared, along with two pre-trained language models, word2vec and BERT. We have found that the BERT-BiLSTM-CRF model can achieve approximately 75% F1 score, which outperformed all other models during the tests.