From Texts to Structured Documents: The Case of Health Practice Guidelines

TL;DR

This paper presents a system that semi-automatically converts clinical practice guidelines from free text into structured XML documents, capturing implicit semantic information to facilitate better data organization and retrieval.

Contribution

It introduces rule-based methods for accurately identifying the scope of conditions in clinical texts, improving automatic structuring of health guidelines.

Findings

Good performance on French practice guidelines

Effective extraction of condition-action pairs

Enhanced semantic annotation accuracy

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 in this paper the rules developed for this task. We show that the system yields good performance when applied to the analysis of French practice guidelines.