Target Concept Guided Medical Concept Normalization in Noisy User-Generated Texts

Medical concept normalization (MCN) i.e., mapping of colloquial medical phrases to standard concepts is an essential step in analysis of medical social media text. The main drawback in existing state-of-the-art approach (Kalyan and Sangeetha, 2020b) is learning target concept vector representations from scratch which requires more number of training instances. Our model is based on RoBERTa and target concept embeddings. In our model, we integrate a) target concept information in the form of target concept vectors generated by encoding target concept descriptions using SRoBERTa, state-of-the-art RoBERTa based sentence embedding model and b) domain lexicon knowledge by enriching target concept vectors with synonym relationship knowledge using retrofitting algorithm. It is the first attempt in MCN to exploit both target concept information as well as domain lexicon knowledge in the form of retrofitted target concept vectors. Our model outperforms all the existing models with an accuracy improvement up to 1.36% on three standard datasets. Further, our model when trained only on mapping lexicon synonyms achieves up to 4.87% improvement in accuracy.