An object-oriented approach to the semantic interpretation of medical text

Abstract

A primary problem in the area of text understanding is semantic analysis. This involves both formalizing the general and domain-dependent semantic information relevant to the task involved, and providing an appropriate mapping between the syntactic constituents of a parsed sentence and the semantic representation of the sentence based on the semantic information. This study introduces an object-oriented approach to semantic interpetation that integrates the semantic processing into syntactic structures. The semantic interpreter has two components. The first is a syntactic decomposer. It takes the syntactic description for a sentence as its input, mapping the syntactic structure into an object tree. The other is a semantic merger. It starts from lexical items and merges the semantic frames attached to the objects of syntactic components recursively until a semantic frame net for the sentence is produced. A frame language is designed to formalize the semantic information into semantic frames. This semantic interpreter has been integrated with an automatic knowledge acquisition system that builds the knowledge base for expert systems from medical text. The source of the text was medical diagnosis for heart diseases by ECG. The system is implemented in an object-oriented programming (C + + ). Some results of the application are presented and discussed. © 1995.