Ngo Thanh Nhan

Natural Language Processing and the Representation of Clinical Data

OBJECTIVE Develop a representation of clinical observations and actions and a method of processing free-text patient documents to facilitate applications such as quality assurance. DESIGN The Linguistic String Project (LSP) system of New York University utilizes syntactic analysis, augmented by a sublanguage grammar and an information structure that are specific to the clinical narrative, to map free-text documents into a database for querying. MEASUREMENTS Information precision (I-P) and information recall (I-R) were measured for queries for the presence of 13 asthma-health-care quality assurance criteria in a database generated from 59 discharge letters. RESULTS I-P, using counts of major errors only, was 95.7% for the 28-letter training set and 98.6% for the 31-letter test set. I-R, using counts of major omissions only, was 93.9% for the training set and 92.5% for the test set.

Model-based analysis of messages about equipment

The aim of PROTEUS - a system for the analysis of short technical texts - is to increase the reliability of the analysis process through the integration of syntactic and semantic constraints, domain knowledge, and knowledge of discourse structure. This system is initially being applied to the analysis of messages describing the failure, diagnosis, and repair of selected pieces of equipment. This has required us to develop a detailed model of the structure and function of the equipment involved. We focus in this paper on the nature of this model and the roles it plays in the syntactic and semantic analysis of the text.

A natural language oriented XML knowledge representation for medical documents

The XML medical knowledge representation (XMKR) is not a coding system, rather it is a medical knowledge system that tags the different manifestations of codified medical knowledge as they appear in text documents and models different medical systems appearing in text documents. The XMKR tagged documents can be viewed in different styles according to the needs of users.

Dutch Sublanguage Semantic Tagging combined with Mark-Up Technology

In this paper, we want to show how the morphological component of an existing NLP-system for Dutch (Dutch Medical Language Processor - DMLP) has been extended in order to produce output that is compatible with the language independent modules of the LSP-MLP system (Linguistic String Project - Medical Language Processor) of the New York University. The former can take advantage of the language independent developments of the latter, while focusing on idiosyncrasies for Dutch. This general strategy will be illustrated by a practical application, namely the highlighting of relevant information in a patient discharge summary (PDS) by means of modern HyperText Mark-Up Language (HTML) technology. Such an application can be of use for medical administrative purposes in a hospital environment.

A proposal for Vietnamese character encoding standards in a unified text processing framework

Abstract A Vietnamese 8-bit character encoding standard is proposed that satisfies adequacy of character representation, and permits compatibility with existing software, adherence to current communications protocols, and fidelity of glyphic rendering within a broader text processing framework. The encoding approach is mixed, combining both separable and precomposed architectures. This unified code table also provides the basis for consistent integration into emerging 16- and 32-bit character encoding standards for multilingual computing.