Some issues in the clinical application of computational linguistics

This paper is concerned with the design and implementation of computer software for the automatic analysis of clinical language data. It first sets out a number of widely accepted principles governing the production of high-quality computer software in general. It then discusses a series of issues relating specifically to the design of clinically oriented computational linguistic analysis systems in accordance with those principles. The issues in question focus on (i) the representation of linguistic knowledge within the computing system, (ii) the choice of suitable algorithms, (iii) the handling of problematic data, (iv) the interaction of the user with such systems, and (v) the implementation details of those systems.