A quantitative and qualitative evaluation of sentence boundary detection for the clinical domain

Sentence boundary detection (SBD) is a critical preprocessing task for many natural language processing (NLP) applications. However, there has been little work on evaluating how well existing methods for SBD perform in the clinical domain. We evaluate five popular off-the-shelf NLP toolkits on the task of SBD in various kinds of text using a diverse set of corpora, including the GENIA corpus of biomedical abstracts, a corpus of clinical notes used in the 2010 i2b2 shared task, and two general-domain corpora (the British National Corpus and Switchboard). We find that, with the exception of the cTAKES system, the toolkits we evaluate perform noticeably worse on clinical text than on general-domain text. We identify and discuss major classes of errors, and suggest directions for future work to improve SBD methods in the clinical domain. We also make the code used for SBD evaluation in this paper available for download at http://github.com/drgriffis/SBD-Evaluation.