[Ltg] HAIL Seminar (8th Map): Professor Jon Patrick, University of Sydney

[Ronnie.Ma at csiro.au]

                      H.A.I.L. Seminar series
                          CSIRO ICT Centre
                   http://www.ict.csiro.au/HAIL/


Title:          NLP of Medical Records

Speaker:        Professor Jon Patrick
                Chair of Language Technology
                School of Information Technologies
                University of Sydney                

Date:           Tuesday 8th May 2007 at 11am

Location:       CSIRO ICT Centre,
                Building E6B, Macquarie University.

                See <http://www.ict.csiro.au/HAIL/location.htm> for
details.

Video:          We usually stream live video of seminars.

                At the seminar time (see above), point your browser at:
 
<http://webcast.nsw.csiro.au/httpfs/ICT/HailSeminar/live.asx>


Abstract

The medical record contains most of its worthwhile content in natural
language and so building a domain specific processor would seem to be a
useful and straightforward task. Unfortunately that is far from the real
situation. The effective extraction of useful content from the medical
record requires coming to terms with large medical ontologies, serious
gradations of grammaticality, and documents of different registers, for
example discharge summaries, clinical notes, and pathology reports. The
motivations for processing the medical record are also diverse and leave
open a series of design questions about the nature of how to target the
NLP for the post processing systems. Some of these processing systems
are decision support systems to guide patient care, auditing patient
care against clinical protocols, extracting knowledge from published
texts, or for epidemiological analysis. The task is further complicated
by the need to extract the data from large legacy hospital information
systems and in some cases to bolt on new technology to old systems.

These problems will be discussed with illustrations from the large range
of projects oriented around the needs of our health collaborators.

Short resume

Jon Patrick first built language technology systems in the 1980s to
record the descriptions of teams sports in real-time. His early systems
were adopted by television for Australian Rules football, NRL clubs of
Rugby, WACB for cricket, and the Australian Institute of Sport for water
polo. In the early 90s he trained in psychotherapy and developed a
computational approach to analysing therapeutic language to asses its
effectiveness. Since moving to the University of Sydney in 1998 he has
published a grammar reference book of the Basque language, and developed
an active learning system for converting multi-lingual dictionaries into
XML knowledgebases. He was the inaugural director of the Capital Markets
CRC Language Technology research program and is currently director of
the Scamseek Project.

----------------------------------------
The HAIL Seminars' URL:
http://www.ict.csiro.au/HAIL/

Contacts:       Andrew Lampert
Address:        CSIRO HAIL Seminars,
                c/o Andrew Lampert,
                Locked Bag 17,
                North Ryde NSW 1670

Phone:  (02) 9325 3100
Email:  Andrew.Lampert at csiro.au



*Administration*
-----------------------------------------------------------------
* To leave the list, send the message "unsubscribe HailSeminars" to
the list server address <majordomo at nsw.cmis.csiro.au>.
The subject line of your e-mail message will be ignored.