Walker, D., & Hobbs, J. (1981, November). Natural language access to medical text. In Proceedings. Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care (pp. 269-273).
Abstract
This paper describes research on the development of a methodology for representing the information in texts and of procedures for relating the linguistic structure of a request to the corresponding representations. The work is being done in the context of a prototype system that will allow physicians and other health professionals to access information in a computerized textbook of hepatitis through natural language dialogues. The interpretation of natural language queries is derived from DIAMOND/DIAGRAM, a linguistically motivated, domain-independent natural language interface developed at SRI. A text access component is being developed that uses representations of the propositional content of text passages and of the hierarchical structure of the text as a whole to retrieve relevant information.