Precise Medication Extraction using Agile Text Mining

Agile text mining is widely used for commercial text mining in the pharmaceutical industry. It can be applied without building an annotated training corpus, so is well-suited to novel or one-off extraction tasks. In this work we wanted to see how efficiently it could be adapted for healthcare extraction tasks such as medication extraction. The aim was to identify medication names, associated dosage, route of administration, frequency, duration and reason, as specified in the 2009 i2b2 medication challenge. Queries were constructed based on 696 discharge summaries available as training data. Performance was measured on a test dataset of 251 unseen