Report 79-08 Understanding Medical Jargon As If It

This pc)er presents BAOBAB-2, a computer program built around MYCIN [Shortliff e, 1974] that is used for understanding medical summaries describing the status of patients. Due to the stereotypic way the physicians present medical problems in these summaries in addition to the constrained nature of medical jargon, these texts have a very strong structure. BAOBAB-2 takes advantage of these structures by having a model of this organization as a set of related schemas that facilitate the interpretation of these texts. Structures of the schemes and their relation to the surface structure are described. Issues relating to selection and use of these schemes by the program during Interpretation of the summaries ara discussed.