A Field Theoretical Approach to Medical Natural Language Processing
A parser for medical free text reports has been developed that is based on a chemistry/physics inspired ldquofield theoryrdquo for word-word sentence-level dependencies. The transition from the linguistic world to the world of interacting particles with potential energies is guided by a psycholingui...
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Published in | IEEE transactions on information technology in biomedicine Vol. 11; no. 4; pp. 364 - 375 |
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Main Authors | , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
United States
IEEE
01.07.2007
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | A parser for medical free text reports has been developed that is based on a chemistry/physics inspired ldquofield theoryrdquo for word-word sentence-level dependencies. The transition from the linguistic world to the world of interacting particles with potential energies is guided by a psycholinguistics thought experiment related to the amount of ldquoworkrdquo required to bring a reference word into an anchored configuration of words. Calibration experiments involving four and five grams were conducted. Data from these experiments were used as a knowledge source for estimating field conditions for words in sentences sampled from a corpus of medical reports. The result of the parser is a dependency tree that represents the global minimum energy state of the system of words for a given sentence. The system was trained and tested on a corpus of radiology reports. Preliminary performance, as quantified by link recall and precision statistics, is 84.9% and 89.9%, respectively. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 ObjectType-Article-2 ObjectType-Feature-1 |
ISSN: | 1089-7771 1558-0032 |
DOI: | 10.1109/TITB.2006.884368 |