Knowledge Based Analysis of Radiology Reports Using Conceptual Graphs

The telegraphic language found in radiological reports can be well understood by a natural language system using the underlying domain knowledge. We present the METEXA system, which emphasizes the use of radiological domain knowledge to determine the semantics of utterances. Syntactic and semantic analysis, lexical semantics and the structure of the domain model are described in some detail. A resolution-based inference engine answers relevant questions concerning the contents of the reports. As knowledge representation formalism the Conceptual Graph Theory by John Sowa has been chosen.

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