The Role of Coreference Resolution in Outbreak Reporting and Detection

A coreference resolution system was developed using publicly available text documents unrelated to public health. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of the same system on disease outbreak reports. The unmodified system was able to correctly identify 73.91% of outbreak report references, showing that coreference resolution can perform well in health-related text even when trained on unrelated text. We discuss challenges of CR specific to the public health domain and how using CR is an important step in automatically identifying and extracting data otherwise hidden by referring expressions.