Download - American Nursing Informatics Association

Natural Language Processing and Understanding
‘Just because
it is free text
doesn’t mean
it has no
value.’
CARING educational event took
Aplace on October 3, 2006 at the
Skyline Complex in Falls Church,
VA. Participation was available via
Webex. Fifteen people registered to
attend in person, and 40 registered for
the Webex, including one from
Canada and one from Finland. The
session was titled “Introduction to
Natural Language Processing and
Understanding: Enter Clinical Data
the Way You Want, Capture
Clinical Data the Way You Need.”
Natural Language Processing” (NLP)
and Natural Language Understanding
(NLU) are emerging technologies that
continue to show promise for
extracting data from free text
documents.
CARING member Karen Doyle
with Dave Hellman and Dr.
James Flanagan from Language
and Computing developed this
session to explain some of the
basics of NLP and NLU
technologies. Definitions of the
associated terms include:
• Natural language: Any
language naturally used by
people – for example,
English, Spanish, or
Arabic; not a
programming language
such as BASIC, C ++, or
XML
• Natural Language
“Processing” (NLP): the
process of building
computational models for
understanding natural
language that is Machine
Dave Hellman
Readable
Input: natural language
text
Output: representation of the meaning of text
• Natural Language “Understanding” language (NLU): means knowing
what concepts a word or phrase stands for and how to link those concepts
together and is Machine Understandable
Input: natural language text
Output: interpretation of the infinite ways a human can express a concept
Use cases helped to demonstrate using NLP and NLU to transform the free text
from History and Physicals, Discharge Summaries, and other clinical notes into
discreet data elements that can:
• Improve patient safety and decision support applications
• Implement HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) representation.
• Populate a clinical data warehouse
• Support the billing and reimbursement process
The hour long session was very informative and provided a basic premise for
using an application that can capture and interpret data from free text entries.
This recorded Webinar is available for free viewing or downloading by
registering with your name and email address by using this link:
https://landc-events.webex.com/landc-events/onstage/g.php?
AT=VR&RecordingID=297314027
For more information, please contact Karen Doyle at karen@landcglobal.com.
Karen Doyle
CARING • Page 8