Automatically Restructuring Practice Guidelines using the GEM DTD

TL;DR

This paper presents a semi-automatic system that restructures clinical practice guidelines into XML format, capturing semantic condition-action pairs, demonstrated effectively on French guidelines.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system for extracting and structuring semantic information from free text in clinical guidelines into XML templates.

Findings

Good performance on French practice guidelines

Effective extraction of condition-action pairs

Automates restructuring process

Abstract

This paper describes a system capable of semi-automatically filling an XML template from free texts in the clinical domain (practice guidelines). The XML template includes semantic information not explicitly encoded in the text (pairs of conditions and actions/recommendations). Therefore, there is a need to compute the exact scope of conditions over text sequences expressing the required actions. We present a system developed for this task. We show that it yields good performance when applied to the analysis of French practice guidelines.