Incorporating Risk Factor Embeddings in Pre-trained Transformers Improves Sentiment Prediction in Psychiatric Discharge Summaries

Reducing rates of early hospital readmission has been recognized and identified as a key to improve quality of care and reduce costs. There are a number of risk factors that have been hypothesized to be important for understanding re-admission risk, including such factors as problems with substance abuse, ability to maintain work, relations with family. In this work, we develop RoBERTa-based models to predict the sentiment of sentences describing readmission risk factors in discharge summaries of patients with psychosis. We improve substantially on previous results by a scheme that shares information across risk factors while also allowing the model to learn risk factor-specific information.