Medical Entity Linking in Laypersons’ Language

Abstract

Due to the vast amount of health-related data on the Internet, a trend toward digital health literacy is emerging among laypersons. We hypothesize that providing trustworthy explanations of informal medical terms in social media can improve information quality. Entity linking (EL) is the task of associating terms with concepts (entities) in the knowledge base. The challenge with EL in lay medical texts is that the source texts are often written in loose and informal language. We propose an end-to-end entity linking approach that involves identifying informal medical terms, normalizing medical concepts according to SNOMED-CT, and linking entities to Wikipedia to provide explanations for laypersons.