SNOMEDtxt: Natural Language Generation from SNOMED Ontology

Abstract

SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) defines over 70,000 diseases, including many rare ones. Meanwhile, descriptions of rare conditions are missing from online educational resources. SNOMEDtxt converts ontological concept definitions and relations contained in SNOMED CT into narrative disease descriptions using Natural Language Generation techniques. Generated text is evaluated using both computational methods and clinician and lay user feedback. User evaluations indicate that lay people prefer generated text to the original SNOMED content, find it more informative, and understand it significantly better. This method promises to improve access to clinical knowledge for patients and the medical community and to assist in ontology auditing through natural language descriptions.