Advances in an interdisciplinary science.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to A T McCray.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Over the past several years our research efforts have been directed toward the identification of natural language processing methods and techniques for improving access to biomedical information stored in computerized form. To provide a testing ground for some of these ideas we have undertaken the development of SPECIALIST, a prototype system for parsing and accessing biomedical text. The system includes linguistic and biomedical knowledge. Linguistic knowledge involves rules and facts about the grammar of the language. Biomedical knowledge involves rules and facts about the domain of biomedicine. The UMLS knowledge sources, Meta-1 and the Semantic Network, as well as the UMLS test collection, have recently contributed to the development of the SPECIALIST system.
Online dictionaries can be important tools for research and application in natural language processing. This paper describes work with a machine-readable version of "Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary". First the characteristics of the dictionary are briefly described, and then the complex process of converting the tape to an online interactive dictionary is discussed. The results of several experiments in automatically deriving information from the online dictionary are presented, and the paper ends with a discussion of the use of the online dictionary as a tool in the development of a natural language processing system designed for the biomedical domain.