Pre-trained Language Models and Few-shot Learning for Medical Entity Extraction

Abstract

This study proposes a medical entity extraction method based on Transformer to enhance the information extraction capability of medical literature. Considering the professionalism and complexity of medical texts, we compare the performance of different pre-trained language models (BERT, BioBERT, PubMedBERT, ClinicalBERT) in medical entity extraction tasks. Experimental results show that PubMedBERT achieves the best performance (F1-score = 88.8%), indicating that a language model pre-trained on biomedical literature is more effective in the medical domain. In addition, we analyze the impact of different entity extraction methods (CRF, Span-based, Seq2Seq) and find that the Span-based approach performs best in medical entity extraction tasks (F1-score = 88.6%). It demonstrates superior accuracy in identifying entity boundaries. In low-resource scenarios, we further explore the application of Few-shot Learning in medical entity extraction. Experimental results show that even with only 10-shot training samples, the model achieves an F1-score of 79.1%, verifying the effectiveness of Few-shot Learning under limited data conditions. This study confirms that the combination of pre-trained language models and Few-shot Learning can enhance the accuracy of medical entity extraction. Future research can integrate knowledge graphs and active learning strategies to improve the model's generalization and stability, providing a more effective solution for medical NLP research. Keywords- Natural Language Processing, medical named entity recognition, pre-trained language model, Few-shot Learning, information extraction, deep learning