Uncovering Variations in Clinical Notes for NLP Modeling

Clinical text contains rich patient information and has attracted much research interest in applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to model it. In this study, we quantified and analyzed the textual characteristics of five common clinical note types using multiple measurements, including lexical-level features, semantic content, and grammaticality. We found there exist significant linguistic variations in different clinical note types, while some types tend to be more similar than others.