"Units of Meaning" in Medical Documents: Natural Language Processing Perspective

This paper discusses principles for the design of natural language processing (NLP) systems to automatically extract of data from doctor's notes, laboratory results and other medical documents in free-form text. We argue that rather than searching for 'atom units of meaning' in the text and then trying to generalize them into a broader set of documents through increasingly complicated system of rules, an NLP practitioner should take concepts as a whole as a meaningful unit of text. This simplifies the rules and makes NLP system easier to maintain and adapt. The departure point is purely practical, however a deeper investigation of typical problems with the implementation of such systems leads us to a discussion of broader theoretical principles underlying the NLP practices.