SALTClass: classifying clinical short notes using background knowledge from unlabeled data

Background With the increasing use of unstructured text in electronic health records, extracting useful related information has become a necessity. Text classification can be applied to extract patients’ medical history from clinical notes. However, the sparsity in clinical short notes, that is, excessively small word counts in the text, can lead to large classification errors. Previous studies demonstrated that natural language processing (NLP) can be useful in the text classification of clinical outcomes. We propose incorporating the knowledge from unlabeled data, as this may alleviate the p... Mehr ...