Syntactic-semantic tagging as a mediator between linguistic representations and formal models: an exercise in linking SNOMED to GALEN

Natural language understanding applications are good candidates to solve th e knowledge acquisition bottleneck when designing large scale concept syste ms. However, a necessary condition is that systems are built that transform sentences into a meaning representation that is independent of the subtlet ies of linguistic structure that nevertheless underly the way language work s. The Cassandra II syntactic-semantic tagging system fulfills this goal pa rtially. Within the GALEN-IN-USE project, it is used to transform linguisti c representations of surgical procedure expressions into conceptual represe ntations. In this paper, the proctology chapter of the SNOMED V3.1 procedur e axis was used as a testbed to evaluate the usefulness of this approach. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data obtained is presented, s howing that the Cassandra system can indeed complement the manual modelling efforts being conducted in the GALEN-IN-USE project. The different require ments related to linguistic modelling versus conceptual modelling can partl y be accounted for by using an interface ontology, of which the fine tuning will however remain an important effort. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. Al l rights reserved.