NLP applied to occupational health: MEDDOPROF shared task at IberLEF 2021 on automatic recognition, classification and normalization of professions and occupations from medical texts

Abstract

Among the socio-demographic patient characteristics, occupations play an important role regarding not only occupational health, work-related accidents and exposure to toxic/pathogenic agents, but also their impact on general physical and mental health. This paper presents the Medical Documents Profession Recogni-tion (MEDDOPROF) shared task (held within IberLEF/SEPLN 2021), focused on the recognition and normalization of occupations in medical documents in Spanish. MEDDOPROF proposes three challenges: NER (recognition of professions, employ-ment statuses and activities in text), CLASS (classifying each occupation mention to its holder, i.e. patient or family member) and NORM (normalizing mentions to their identifier in ESCO or SNOMED CT). From the total of 40 registered teams, 15 submitted a total of 94 runs for the various sub-tracks. Best-performing systems were based on deep-learning technologies (incl. transformers) and achieved 0.818 F-score in occupation detection (NER), 0.793 in classifying occupations to their ref-erent (CLASS) and 0.619 in normalization (NORM). Future initiatives should also address multilingual aspects and application to other domains like social services, human resources, legal or job market data analytics and policy makers.