I don't have an opinion about how it should work. But I can verify that the clinical notes from Mayo Clinic that were used in the initial cTAKES sentence detector model had the list markers included in the first sentence, so, for example, the following would be two sentences, with each line a separate sentence.
#1 Dilated esophagus. #2 Adenocarcinoma -- James -----Original Message----- From: Miller, Timothy [mailto:timothy.mil...@childrens.harvard.edu] Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2014 6:04 AM To: dev@ctakes.apache.org Subject: RE: question about sentence segmentation > My preference is to treat the list row number as outside of the sentence of interest. Or if it is necessary to be included in a sentence, have it be a sentence on its own. I can get behind this, I think it makes the issue a bit cleaner, to either have the list header as non-sentential or it's own sentence. As far as I can tell, this is not the current default behavior. At least in my runs the list header seems to get attached to the first following sentence, even in cases where it starts with a digit and a period ("3. Magnesium oxide 400 mg p.o. daily." is all one sentence). This behavior is probably strongly dependent on the annotations we give the sentence detector so as I'm prepping new training data I should have a default in mind. Does anyone have any objections to changing the sentence detector behavior to break list headers (things like "3." or "A " or "#5") as their own sentence? Tim ________________________________________ From: Britt Fitch [britt.fi...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, July 14, 2014 8:29 AM To: dev@ctakes.apache.org Subject: Re: question about sentence segmentation My preference is to treat the list row number as outside of the sentence of interest. Or if it is necessary to be included in a sentence, have it be a sentence on its own. That won't be as straightforward as splitting on a period in cases like "2. Magnesium oxide 400 mg p.o. daily." In cases where there are more than 1 written sentence like your example in the original email, I'd prefer those were each a sentence rather than making the entire list line a single sentence. My feeling is that each line without terminating punctuation would be a single sentence and would exclude the list number. As an aside, I have encountered several issues with numbered lists being interpreted differently depending on 1. what number is included at the start for example: "2. Magnesium oxide 400 mg p.o. daily." vs "12. Magnesium oxide 400 mg p.o. daily." (This appears to be a chunking issue where the line starting with "12. Magnesium" is identified as starting with chunks [O, O, B-NP, B-NP, I-NP, B-NP, B-ADVP, O] even though the parts of speech appear to be correct) 2. whether there is a period at the end of a list for example: "4. CHF" vs "4. CHF." (This appears to be an issue with the chunker though which produces [O,O] in the first case and [B-VP, B-NP, O] in the second. Cheers, Britt On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 7:50 AM, Miller, Timothy < timothy.mil...@childrens.harvard.edu> wrote: > Just curious about an edge case regarding headers/lists and wondering what > people think the correct behavior and annotation are. > > In cases like this: > > #1 Dilated esophagus. > #2 Adenocarcinoma > > my intuition is that each whole line is one sentence. But then there are > cases where the number may be followed by multiple sentences on one line. > 1. EGD as a complex procedure. If there is an abnormality, obtain biopsies. > > For this example my intuition is not as clear. Should there be a break > after the "1." or should the first sentence be "1. EGD as a complex > procedure."? Again, my intuition leans towards the latter but it seems a > bit odd since the "1." kind of distributes over all the following sentences > (i.e. it's like a paragraph descriptor.) > > Does the period after the 1 matter? The number of sentences after the list > header? The fact that it's all on one line? Anything else? > > Tim >