A NATURAL-LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING SYSTEM COMBINING SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC TECHNIQUES

A large proportion of the medical record currently available in comput erized medical information systems is in the form of free text reports . While the accessibility of this source of data is improved through i nclusion in the computerized record, it remains unavailable for automa ted decision support, medical research, and management of medical deli very systems. Natural language understanding systems (NLUS) designed t o encode free text reports represent one approach to making this infor mation available for these uses. Below we describe an experimental NLU S designed to parse the reports of chest radiographs and store the cli nical data extracted in a medical data base.