Can ISO 24617-1 go clinical? Extending a General-Domain Scheme to Medical Narratives

Abstract

The definition of rigorous and well-structured annotation schemes is a key element in the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP). This paper aims to compare the perfor- mance of a general-purpose annotation scheme - Text2Story, based on the ISO 24617-1 stan- dard - with that of a domain-specific scheme - i2b2 - in the context of clinical narrative annotation; and to assess the feasibility of har- monizing ISO 24617-1, originally designed for general-domain applications, with a special- ized extension tailored to the medical domain. Based on the results of this comparative analy- sis, we present Med2Story, a medical-specific extension of ISO 24617-1 developed to address the particularities of clinical text annotation.