Understanding and Improving Disability Identification in Medical Documents

Disabilities are a problem that affects a large number of people in the world. Gathering information about them is crucial to improve the daily life of the people who suffer from them but, since disabilities are often strongly associated with different types of diseases, the available data are widely dispersed. In this work we review existing proposal for the problem, making an in-depth analysis, and from it we make a proposal that improves the results of previous systems. The analysis focuses on the results of the participants in DIANN shared task was proposed (IberEval 2018), devoted to the detection of named disabilities in electronic documents. In order to evaluate the proposed systems using a common evaluation framework, a corpus of documents, in both English and Spanish, was gathered and annotated. Several teams participated in the task, either using classic methods or proposing specific approaches to deal effectively with the complexities of the task. Our aim is to provide insight for future advances in the field by analyzing the participating systems and identifying the most effective approaches and elements to tackle the problem. We have validated the lessons learned from this analysis through a new proposal that includes the most promising elements used by the participating teams. The proposed system improves, for both languages, the results obtained during the task.