Learning to Temporally Order Medical Events in Clinical Text

We investigate the problem of ordering medical events in unstructured clinical narratives by learning to rank them based on their time of occurrence. We represent each medical event as a time duration, with a corresponding start and stop, and learn to rank the starts/stops based on their proximity to the admission date. Such a representation allows us to learn all of Allen’s temporal relations between medical events. Interestingly, we observe that this methodology performs better than a classification-based approach for this domain, but worse on the relationships found in the Timebank corpus. This finding has important implications for styles of data representation and resources used for temporal relation learning: clinical narratives may have different language attributes corresponding to temporal ordering relative to Timebank, implying that the field may need to look at a wider range of domains to fully understand the nature of temporal ordering.