NATURAL-LANGUAGE PROCESSING OF MEDICAL TEXTS WITHIN THE HELIOS ENVIRONMENT

A large number of hospital applications are potentially interested in natural language processing since they currently heavily depend on an efficient use of a huge amount of textual information. The need for sy stems that are able to accept multiple European languages is of paramo unt interest, as language barriers can be a strong impediment for larg e-scale communication in Europe, in particular regarding telemedicine. In the context of the AIM project HELIOS, the Natural Language Proces sing (NLP) component offers a large variety of medical services accord ing to natural language free input. It allows the multilingual analysi s of medical texts (currently in English, French and German) and the s torage of the meaning of these texts under a deep knowledge representa tion that can be queried whenever it is needed. In addition, it provid es facilities to handle knowledge source embedded into the conceptual typologies and into the dictionaries. This article aims at describing all these functionalities and their integration into the environment o f the HELIOS project.