Scientific article
OA Policy
English

Beyond tokens : fair evaluation of french large language models for clinical named entity recognition

Published inStudies in health technology and informatics, vol. 316, p. 666-670
Publication date2024-08-22
Abstract

Named Entity Recognition (NER) models based on Transformers have gained prominence for their impressive performance in various languages and domains. This work delves into the often-overlooked aspect of entity-level metrics and exposes significant discrepancies between token and entity-level evaluations. The study utilizes a corpus of synthetic French oncological reports annotated with entities representing oncological morphologies. Four different French BERT-based models are fine-tuned for token classification, and their performance is rigorously assessed at both token and entity-level. In addition to fine-tuning, we evaluate ChatGPT's ability to perform NER through prompt engineering techniques. The findings reveal a notable disparity in model effectiveness when transitioning from token to entity-level metrics, highlighting the importance of comprehensive evaluation methodologies in NER tasks. Furthermore, in comparison to BERT, ChatGPT remains limited when it comes to detecting advanced entities in French.

Keywords
  • Clinical NLP
  • Medical Prompt Engineering
  • Named Entity Recognition
  • Natural Language Processing
  • France
  • Humans
  • Electronic Health Records
  • Language
  • Neoplasms
  • Vocabulary, Controlled
Citation (ISO format)
ZAGHIR, Jamil et al. Beyond tokens : fair evaluation of french large language models for clinical named entity recognition. In: Studies in health technology and informatics, 2024, vol. 316, p. 666–670. doi: 10.3233/SHTI240502
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Additional URL for this publicationhttps://ebooks.iospress.nl/doi/10.3233/SHTI240502
Journal ISSN0926-9630
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639downloads

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Creation02/09/2024 08:50:25
First validation23/09/2024 08:52:52
Update13/10/2025 12:41:13
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