Is Boundary Annotation Necessary? Evaluating Boundary-Free Approaches to Improve Clinical Named Entity Annotation Efficiency: Case Study.

Our findings demonstrate a balance between annotation speed and model performance. Although disregarding boundary information affects model performance to some extent, this is counterbalanced by significant reductions in the annotator's workload and notable improvements in the speed of the annotation process. These benefits may prove valuable in various applications, offering an attractive compromise for developers and researchers.