Question answering from natural language medical data bases

Ralph Grishman; Lynette Hirschman

doi:10.1016/0004-3702(78)90011-5

Question answering from natural language medical data bases

Ralph Grishman, Lynette Hirschman

Computer Science

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

This paper describes a system for automatically answering questions about a collection of natural language medical records. The particular records used for an initial experiment were a set of 206 radiology reports. The implementation involves two major steps: manual determination of a suitable tabular structure (information format) for representing the information contained in the medical records, and automatic conversion of the natural language input (for either record or question) into a form corresponding to the data base. For the medical records the conversion into a data base is done by first performing a syntactic and transformational analysis of the sentences, followed by application of formatting transformations. The question-answering procedure has analogous initial steps but undergoes additional steps of processing to translate the question into a retrieval operation on the data base. Samples of the data base and of the question-answering procedure are shown.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	25-43
Number of pages	19
Journal	Artificial Intelligence
Volume	11
Issue number	1-2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/0004-3702(78)90011-5
State	Published - Aug 1978

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Language and Linguistics
Linguistics and Language
Artificial Intelligence

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10.1016/0004-3702(78)90011-5

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title = "Question answering from natural language medical data bases",

abstract = "This paper describes a system for automatically answering questions about a collection of natural language medical records. The particular records used for an initial experiment were a set of 206 radiology reports. The implementation involves two major steps: manual determination of a suitable tabular structure (information format) for representing the information contained in the medical records, and automatic conversion of the natural language input (for either record or question) into a form corresponding to the data base. For the medical records the conversion into a data base is done by first performing a syntactic and transformational analysis of the sentences, followed by application of formatting transformations. The question-answering procedure has analogous initial steps but undergoes additional steps of processing to translate the question into a retrieval operation on the data base. Samples of the data base and of the question-answering procedure are shown.",

author = "Ralph Grishman and Lynette Hirschman",

note = "Funding Information: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This investigation was supported in part by N/H Grant LM 02616 from the National Library of Medicine, in part by Research Grant No. SIS-75-22945 from the National Science Foundation, Division of Science Information, in part by contract N00014-75-C--O571 with the Office of Naval Research, and in part by ERDA Administration Contract EY-76-C--02-3077{"}000. The final stages of both the formatting and the question-answering were programmed by Jim Litsas.",

year = "1978",

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doi = "10.1016/0004-3702(78)90011-5",

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AU - Hirschman, Lynette

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PY - 1978/8

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N2 - This paper describes a system for automatically answering questions about a collection of natural language medical records. The particular records used for an initial experiment were a set of 206 radiology reports. The implementation involves two major steps: manual determination of a suitable tabular structure (information format) for representing the information contained in the medical records, and automatic conversion of the natural language input (for either record or question) into a form corresponding to the data base. For the medical records the conversion into a data base is done by first performing a syntactic and transformational analysis of the sentences, followed by application of formatting transformations. The question-answering procedure has analogous initial steps but undergoes additional steps of processing to translate the question into a retrieval operation on the data base. Samples of the data base and of the question-answering procedure are shown.

AB - This paper describes a system for automatically answering questions about a collection of natural language medical records. The particular records used for an initial experiment were a set of 206 radiology reports. The implementation involves two major steps: manual determination of a suitable tabular structure (information format) for representing the information contained in the medical records, and automatic conversion of the natural language input (for either record or question) into a form corresponding to the data base. For the medical records the conversion into a data base is done by first performing a syntactic and transformational analysis of the sentences, followed by application of formatting transformations. The question-answering procedure has analogous initial steps but undergoes additional steps of processing to translate the question into a retrieval operation on the data base. Samples of the data base and of the question-answering procedure are shown.

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Question answering from natural language medical data bases

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