Coreference resolution: A review of general methodologies and applications in the clinical domain

Coreference resolution is the task of determining linguistic expressions that refer to the same real-world entity in natural language. Research on coreference resolution in the general English domain dates back to 1960s and 1970s. However, research on coreference resolution in the clinical free text has not seen major development. The recent US government initiatives that promote the use of electronic health records (EHRs) provide opportunities to mine patient notes as more and more health care institutions adopt EHR. Our goal was to review recent advances in general purpose coreference resolution to lay the foundation for methodologies in the clinical domain, facilitated by the availability of a shared lexical resource of gold standard coreference annotations, the Ontology Development and Information Extraction (ODIE) corpus.

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► Coreference links linguistic expressions that refer to the same real-world entity.
► Coreference resolution is indispensable to make use of the information in the EHR.
► Review of heuristic, supervised and unsupervised methods in general domain.
► Advance in the clinical domain hampered by lack of corpora.