A New Era for Procurement Text Mining

Table of Links

1. Abstract and Introduction

2. Domain and Task

   2.1. Data sources and complexity

   2.2. Task definition

3. Related Work

   3.1. Text mining and NLP research overview

   3.2. Text mining and NLP in industry use

   3.3. Text mining and NLP for procurement

   3.4. Conclusion from literature review

4. Proposed Methodology

   4.1. Domain knowledge

   4.2. Content extraction

   4.3. Lot zoning

   4.4. Lot item detection

   4.5. Lot parsing

   4.6. XML parsing, data joining, and risk indices development

5. Experiment and Demonstration

   5.1. Component evaluation

   5.2. System demonstration

6. Discussion

   6.1. The ‘industry’ focus of the project

   6.2. Data heterogeneity, multilingual and multi-task nature

   6.3. The dilemma of algorithmic choices

   6.4. The cost of training data

7. Conclusion, Acknowledgements, and References

7. Conclusion

Text mining and NLP have been long established research fields for decades. Their techniques have also been widely adopted in industries to develop and deploy intelligent systems for automated analysis of large scale text data. However, the literature is dominated by research that favours supervised methods built on well-curated data. Solutions in such a ‘lab environment’ often do not transfer well to practical scenarios. Instead, studies reporting industrial text mining/NLP tasks often make use of rule-based methods and domain lexicons. But they typically look at single and sometimes simplified tasks, and do not discuss in-depth data heterogeneity and inconsistency and their implication on the development of their methods. Further, few prior work has focused on the healthcare domain.

Set in this context, our work describes an industry project that developed text mining methods and solutions to mine millions of heterogeneous, multilingual procurement documents in the healthcare sector. We extract structured procurement contract data and store them in a database that drives a platform enabling easy evaluation of supplier risks. Our work sets reference for future research and practice in many ways: 1) it develops the first structured procurement contract database that will help facilitate the tendering process; 2) it documents a method that effectively uses domain knowledge and generalises to multiple text mining and NLP tasks and languages; 3) and it discusses lessons learned for practical text mining/NLP development.

Drawing from our lessons, we make a few recommendations for researchers and practitioners. First, we argue that research needs to ‘step out of the lab environment’ by using data that more reflects reality. Research data are typically well-curated and pre-processed. But as we have seen, in practice, real data is rarely good quality and highly inconsistent. This means that practitioners often need to make a significant effort to cleanse their data, or adapt state-of-the-art from research. Both are non-trivial. Also, rules continue to be important and effective in many real world applications, as they are easier to implement, fit for purpose, and easy to interpret. We believe an interesting direction is for model explainability research to develop methods that can explain model decisions in terms of rules beyond the current ‘primitive’ approaches (e.g., feature weights, attentions). These may offer valuable insights for building domain-specific applications. Third, for practitioners, we recommend that they focus on their real needs when it comes to algorithmic choices. While the recent text mining and NLP research has seen deep neural networks – especially very large language models trained on massive corpora – taking over the centre stage, the added value to businesses in practice may depend on the domain and task. This is particularly important if the business has restricted access to resources, as these methods are much more resource intensive than classic machine learning models. Finally, building industrial text mining and NLP applications usually entails a process involving multiple tasks. While often, there can be tried-and-tested methods for each task, one needs to again consider their resource constraints and it helps to think in terms of building solutions that can generalise to a wide range of tasks instead of buying or adapting ad-hoc solutions for each task.

Our work has a number of limitations. First, we have not evaluated the end system, i.e., the platform for deriving supplier risk profiles. This is primarily due to the work being taken further for development by the industry partner before being presented to end users. An end-user evaluation would be an extremely valuable exercise to examine the effectiveness of our text mining and NLP methods. Second, our work has focused on a specific sub-area of healthcare – pharmaceuticals. This is arguably an easier sub-area compared to medical equipment where the naming and standards can be very inconsistent. Therefore, it is difficult to conclude how our methods can generalise to these areas.

In terms of future work, we identify three main directions. First, we will look at adapting our solution to other areas of the healthcare sector (e.g., medical equipment as mentioned above), or other sectors. Second, while within the project, we only analysed procurement documents, another source of useful information is supplier websites and their product catalogues. We envisage to mine such data in the future to enrich our database. Finally, we recognise a lack of research in the area of procurement text mining and NLP. For this reason, we plan to release part of our data (subject to further processing to redact sensitive information) for use by the research community and set up shared task to encourage effort on this direction.

Acknowledgements

Part of this work was funded by the Innovate UK under the project 90205 ‘AI-powered real-time healthcare supplier profile and COVID-19 supply risk matrix’.

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