Use Of Multiaxial Indexing for Information Extraction From Medical Texts

This paper presents a new approach for automatically determining a semantic representation of medical narratives (essentially reports of diagnostic imaging and surgical procedures). It is based on a multiaxial nomenclature (Wingert Nomenclature WNC) and language engineering technologies: a concept-based morpheme lexicon and an indexing algorithm for noun phrases. Founded on this, sets of indices of the nomenclature will be transformed into conceptual graphs (CG), which can be used for information extraction. Transformation rules for mapping syntactic information to semantic roles are used for the semantic representation of meanings of prepositional phrases. The correctness of the representation depends on the complexity of sentences, the accuracy of mapping to concepts of the nomenclature as well as the semantic content of the processed sentences. The project is still in progress. The strategy is currently tested and used for information extraction from medical texts.