Understanding of medico-technical reports

Medical practice produces much in the form of written text. The under-usage of this medical text for research is largely due to difficulties in proces sing the information. The objective of the Aristotle project is to build an automatic data system that is capable of producing a semantic representati on of the text in a canonical form. Understanding the text requires identif ying objects mentioned in the text, their properties, and the links between them. The nature of the syntactic process allows the connection, step-by-s tep, of two lexical units. This connection is immediately controlled by the Interpreter, which assumes the semantic process and queries a knowledge ba se. The syntactic-semantic Interpreter processes one sentence at a time. Th e Assembler module links the meaning of the different sentences and structu res into the output's shape. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights rese rved.