A Dutch medical language processor

Abstract

This paper describes the current state of a medical language processor for Dutch. The goal is to implement a language specific front-end compatible with some existing applications that aim at the intelligent extraction and processing of information from patient discharge summaries. A complete chain for processing and understanding Dutch medical documents will be the ultimate result. The text focuses mainly on the language specific aspects of the language processing chain. Evaluation results of the already functioning components are given as well as an outline for future developments and enhancements. A short theoretical background is provided (cf. also [1–3]: Rossi Mori et al., Proc. SCAMC 90, 1990, pp. 185–189; Wingert, in: Informatics and Medicine, an advanced course, Springer-Verlag, 1977, pp. 579–646; Wingert, Proc. MEDINFO 80, 1980, pp. 1321–1331) before the description of each component in order to familiarise the non-experienced reader with the basic notions of computational linguistics.