Pragmatically-Structured, Lexical-Semantic Knowledge Bases for Unified Medical Language Systems
David Andreoff Evans · PubMed Central · 1988
Unified medical language systems must accommodate expressions ranging from fixed-form standardised vocabularies to the free-text, natural language of medical charts. Such ability will depend on the identification, representation, and organisation of the concepts that form the useful core of the biomedical conceptual domain. The MedSORT-II and UMLS Projects at Carnegie Mellon University have established a feasibile design for the development of lexicons and knowledge bases to support the automated processing of varieties of expressions (in the subdomain of clinical findings) into uniform representations. The essential principle involves incorporating lexical-semantic typing restrictions in a pragmatically-structured knowledge base. The approach does not depend on exhaustive knowledge representation, rather takes advantage of selective, limited relations among concepts. In particular, the projects have demonstrated that practical, comprehensive, and accurate processing of natural-language expressions is attainable with partial knowledge bases, which can be rapidly prototyped.