Temporal Inferences in Medical Texts

The objectives of this paper are twofold, whereby the computer p r o g r a m i s meant to be a particular implementation of a general natural Language [NL] p r o e e s s i n ~ s y s t e m [NI,PSI w h i c h could be used for different domains. The first obiective is to provide a theory for processing temporal information contained i n a well-structured, technical text. The second obiective is to argue for a knowledge-based approach to NLP in which the parsing procedure is driven bv extra Linguistic k n o w l e d R e . The resulting computer program incorporates enough domain-specific and ~enera[ knowledge so that the parsing procedure can be driven by the knowledge base of the program, while a t the same time empLoyin~ a descriptively adequate theory of syntactic processing, i.e., X-bar syntax. My parsing algorithm not only supports the prevalent theories of knowledge-based parsin~ put forth in A[, but also uses a sound linguistic theory for the necessary syntactic information p r o c e s s i n g .