A generative model for unsupervised discovery of relations and argument classes from clinical texts

This paper presents a generative model for the automatic discovery of relations between entities in electronic medical records. The model discovers relation instances and their types by determining which context tokens express the relation. Additionally, the valid semantic classes for each type of relation are determined. We show that the model produces clusters of relation trigger words which better correspond with manually annotated relations than several existing clustering techniques. The discovered relations reveal some of the implicit semantic structure present in patient records.