Cross-evaluation of entity linking and disambiguation systems for clinical text annotation

In this paper we study whether state-of-the-art techniques for multi-domain and multilingual entity linking can be ported to the clinical domain. To do so, we compare two known entity linking systems, BabelFly and TagMe, that leverage on Wikipedia and DBpedia, with the standard clinical semantic annotation and disambiguation system, MetaMap, over the SemRep clinical word sense disambiguation gold standard. We show that BabelFly and especially TagMe, while achieving decent precision on clinical annotation, outmatch MetaMap's F 1-score.