At 10:43 pm +1000 17/8/06, kuang oon wrote:
On 17/08/2006, at 8:49 PM, Ian Cheong wrote:
[...]
It seems likely to me that computers will conquer natural language
processing faster than clinicians en masse can navigate a
controlled vocabulary with accuracy and speed.
That may turn out to be true. Natural language is equivalent to
that flat plate supported on the back of a giant
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortoise>tortoise. that holds up the
universe.
But, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"But it's <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle>turtles all the way down."
We still need the turtles....meaning some distinct layers of
symbolic codes for representation of data.
The point is we need a team of turtles, a linguistic stack, to
support that flat plate that supports the world :)
Interesting...
Medical natural language is built on a stack of symbols and rules for
symbolic combinations:
* medical grammar in common usage, based on english grammar
* medical terminology described in medical dictionaries
* English grammar
* English and adopted words made of letter and as described in dictionaries
* roman alphabet (symbols)
In some respects, an artificial medical language is a duplication of
that stack with another, which tries to mean the same but doesn't
quite exactly.
A key aspect of language is that it is uncontrolled. It happens and
it is generally documented after the fact.
So will medical language autocracy rule over democracy?
Ian.
--
Dr Ian R Cheong, BMedSc, FRACGP, GradDipCompSc, MBA(Exec)
Health Informatics Consultant, Brisbane, Australia
Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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