A Description of Medical Language

A description of medical language for the purposes of automatic processing requires the definition of its basic units & principal components. Like all other specialized languages, medical language is not a compilation of isolated terms, but a medium of communication composed of sentences. Thus, the sentence needs to be posited as the basic unit of description, & all structures that can be generated must be accounted for. This requires an inventory of the semantic types of predicates & classification of their arguments in all possible, nonambiguous usages. Four types of predicates are identified & the successive stages of the description process, leading to the compilation of dictionaries of predicates & arguments, are outlined. 3 References. Adapted from the source document