DrugSemantics: A corpus for Named Entity Recognition in Spanish Summaries of Product Characteristics

For the healthcare sector, it is critical to exploit the vast amount of textual health-related information. Nevertheless, healthcare providers have difficulties to benefit from such quantity of data during pharmacotherapeutic care. The problem is that such information is stored in different sources and their consultation time is limited. In this context, Natural Language Processing techniques can be applied to efficiently transform textual data into structured information so that it could be used in critical healthcare applications, being of help for physicians in their daily workload, such as: decision support systems, cohort identification, patient management, etc. Any development of these techniques requires annotated corpora. However, there is a lack of such resources in this domain and, in most cases, the few ones available concern English.

This paper presents the definition and creation of DrugSemantics corpus, a collection of Summaries of Product Characteristics in Spanish. It was manually annotated with pharmacotherapeutic named entities, detailed in DrugSemantics annotation scheme. Annotators were a Registered Nurse (RN) and two students from the Degree in Nursing. The quality of DrugSemantics corpus has been assessed by measuring its annotation reliability (overall F = 79.33% [95%CI: 78.35–80.31]), as well as its annotation precision (overall P=94.65% [95%CI: 94.11–95.19]). Besides, the gold-standard construction process is described in detail. In total, our corpus contains more than 2000 named entities, 780 sentences and 226,729 tokens. Last, a Named Entity Classification module trained on DrugSemantics is presented aiming at showing the quality of our corpus, as well as an example of how to use it.