Temporal Annotation of German Clinical Language in Real and Synthetic Clinical Documents: Corpus Development and Baseline Tagger Validation Study

We here introduce the first TimeML-compliant annotation scheme for time expressions occurring in German clinical language and apply it to 2 clinical corpora, one with nondistributable real clinical data, the other with distributable synthetic ones. The latter constitutes the first publicly accessible, temporally annotated clinical corpus for the German language. The time tagger trained on these datasets is the first of its kind, fully compliant with the TimeML markup language. The amounts of temporal metadata in our corpora are among the largest datasets ever produced for the clinical domain, both compared with English and German predecessors.