A BERT-Span model for Chinese named entity recognition in rehabilitation medicine

BACKGROUND: Due to various factors such as the increasing aging of the population and the upgrading of people’s health consumption needs, the demand group for rehabilitation medical care is expanding. Currently, China’s rehabilitation medical care encounters several challenges, such as inadequate awareness and a scarcity of skilled professionals. Enhancing public awareness about rehabilitation and improving the quality of rehabilitation services are particularly crucial. Named entity recognition is an essential first step in information processing as it enables the automated extraction of rehabilitation medical entities. These entities play a crucial role in subsequent tasks, including information decision systems and the construction of medical knowledge graphs. METHODS: In order to accomplish this objective, we construct the BERT-Span model to complete the Chinese rehabilitation medicine named entity recognition task. First, we collect rehabilitation information from multiple sources to build a corpus in the field of rehabilitation medicine, and fine-tune Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) with the rehabilitation medicine corpus. For the rehabilitation medicine corpus, we use BERT to extract the feature vectors of rehabilitation medicine entities in the text, and use the span model to complete the annotation of rehabilitation medicine entities. RESULT: Compared to existing baseline models, our model achieved the highest F1 value for the named entity recognition task in the rehabilitation medicine corpus. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms in recognizing both long medical entities and nested medical entities in rehabilitation medical texts. CONCLUSION: The BERT-Span model can effectively identify and extract entity knowledge in the field of rehabilitation medicine in China, which supports the construction of the knowledge graph of rehabilitation medicine and the development of the decision-making system of rehabilitation medicine.