ShAReCLEF eHealth 2013: Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval for Clinical Care

This is the pilot year of the ShARe/CLEF eHealth Evaluation Lab, a shared task focused on natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR) for clinical care. The task is co-organized by the Shared Annotated Resources (ShARe) project and the CLEF Initiative (Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, formerly known as Cross-Language Evaluation Forum). The vision of ShARe/CLEF is two-fold: (1) to develop tasks that potentially impact patient understanding of medical information and (2) to provide the community with an increasingly sophisticated dataset of clinical narrative to advance the state- of-the-art in Natural Language Processing, Information Extraction and Information Retrieval in healthcare. The ShARe/CLEF eHealth 2013 Challenge has three tasks: Task 1 and Task 2 involve annotation of entities in a set of narrative clinical reports; Task 3 involves retrieval of web pages based on queries generated when reading the clinical reports. The datasets for Tasks 1 and 2 comprise de-identified clinical free-text notes from the MIMIC-II database (version 2.5). The dataset for Task 3 consists of a set of medical-related documents provided by the Khresmoi E.U. Consortium. This project provides data files for Task 1 and Task 2 only.