SemScribe: Natural Language Generation for Medical Reports

Sebastian Varges, Heike Bieler, Manfred Stede, Lukas C. Faulstich, Kristin Irsig, Malik Atalla

Abstract
Natural language generation in the medical domain is heavily influenced by domain knowledge and genre-specific text characteristics. We present SemScribe, an implemented natural language generation system that produces doctor's letters, in particular descriptions of cardiological findings. Texts in this domain are characterized by a high density of information and a relatively telegraphic style. Domain knowledge is encoded in a medical ontology of about 80,000 concepts. The ontology is used in particular for concept generalizations during referring expression generation. Architecturally, the system is a generation pipeline that uses a corpus-informed syntactic frame approach for realizing sentences appropriate to the domain. The system reads XML documents conforming to the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) Standard and enhances them with generated text and references to the used data elements. We conducted a first clinical trial evaluation with medical staff and report on the findings.
Anthology ID:
L12-1032
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2674–2681
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/165_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sebastian Varges, Heike Bieler, Manfred Stede, Lukas C. Faulstich, Kristin Irsig, and Malik Atalla. 2012. SemScribe: Natural Language Generation for Medical Reports. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 2674–2681, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
SemScribe: Natural Language Generation for Medical Reports (Varges et al., LREC 2012)
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http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/165_Paper.pdf
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