Improving the recall of biomedical named entity recognition with label re-correction and knowledge distillation

Biomedical named entity recognition is one of the most essential tasks in biomedical information extraction. Previous studies suffer from inadequate annotated datasets, especially the limited knowledge contained in them. To remedy the above issue, we propose a novel Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (BioNER) framework with label re-correction and knowledge distillation strategies, which could not only create large and high-quality datasets but also obtain a high-performance recognition model. Our framework is inspired by two points: (1) named entity recognition should be considered from the perspective of both coverage and accuracy; (2) trustable annotations should be yielded by iterative correction. Firstly, for coverage, we annotate chemical and disease entities in a large-scale unlabeled dataset by PubTator to generate a weakly labeled dataset. For accuracy, we then filter it by utilizing multiple knowledge bases to generate another weakly labeled dataset. Next, the two datasets are revised by a label re-correction strategy to construct two high-quality datasets, which are used to train two recognition models, respectively. Finally, we compress the knowledge in the two models into a single recognition model with knowledge distillation. Experiments on the BioCreative V chemical-disease relation corpus and NCBI Disease corpus show that knowledge from large-scale datasets significantly improves the performance of BioNER, especially the recall of it, leading to new state-of-the-art results. We propose a framework with label re-correction and knowledge distillation strategies. Comparison results show that the two perspectives of knowledge in the two re-corrected datasets respectively are complementary and both effective for BioNER.