---
language: en
license: apache-2.0
library_name: transformers
pipeline_tag: token-classification
tags:
- veterinary
- nlp
- ner
- named-entity-recognition
- biomedical
- feline
- bert
---

# Feline-NER

Named Entity Recognition model for feline veterinary medicine, trained on 1,300 annotated sentences from PubMed literature.

## Model Description

**Feline-NER** is a token classification model fine-tuned for extracting clinical entities from feline veterinary scientific literature.

**Model lineage:**
- Base: **BERT** (Devlin et al., 2019)
- Domain-adapted: **BioBERT v1.2** (Lee et al., 2019) - biomedical literature
- Further adapted: **Feline-BERT** - 11,830 feline PubMed articles (MLM fine-tuning)
- Task-specific: **Feline-NER** - 1,300 manually annotated sentences (token classification)

This model is intended **solely for research and educational use**.

## Task
Span-level named entity recognition using a BIO tagging scheme over five entity types:
- DISEASE
- SYMPTOM
- MEDICATION
- PROCEDURE
- ANATOMY

## Training Data
Fine-tuned on a manually annotated dataset of **1,300 sentences** extracted from feline-related PubMed Central articles.
Annotations were produced by a non-veterinary researcher using an iterative human-in-the-loop workflow with LLM-assisted pre-labeling.

## Evaluation
- **Macro F1:** ~0.65  
- **Micro F1:** ~0.64  
(Evaluated on a 150-sentence held-out test set)

Performance varies by entity type; PROCEDURE and ANATOMY remain challenging due to boundary ambiguity.

## Intended Use
- Veterinary NLP research
- Information extraction from feline scientific literature
- Educational demonstrations

## Usage

This model can be used with the Hugging Face `pipeline` API:

```python
from transformers import pipeline
ner = pipeline("ner", model="Statistical-Impossibility/Feline-NER", aggregation_strategy="simple")
print(ner("The cat was diagnosed with FIV and treated with prednisolone."))
```


## ⚠️ Limitations & Warnings
- **NOT FOR CLINICAL USE**
- Not validated for diagnosis or treatment
- Annotation noise and boundary ambiguity are present
- Single-annotator dataset

## Author
**Statistical-Impossibility**

Project repository: [Feline-Project](https://github.com/Statistical-Impossibility/Feline-Project)