Access to comprehensive medical information is literally a matter of life and death for health professionals. The applicants propose to develop a state-of-the-art medical information system based on natural language processing (NLP) which provides innovative access first to the literature of complementary medicine and then to the traditional medical literature. The goal of Phase I is dual: to develop a finely tuned, immediately usable information system for alternative medicine, and to determine on an experimental level what linguistic elements within the medical subject domain are critical to optimizing retrieval. For this purpose, an extensive analysis of medical sublanguage and the text structure of medical documents will be undertaken, and the results will be applied to each module of the system in order to optimize it for medical domain. The Phase I system will be used by the medical community both for access to hard-to-find information, and to begin to assess the usefulness of complementary medicine techniques in treating chronic problems. Phase II will add traditional medical literature to the system to provide a fully integrated solution for rich, precise access to medical information.
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