title: Structuring Clinical Guidelines through the Recognition of Deontic Operators.
abstract: In this paper, we present a novel approach to structure Clinical Guidelines through the automatic recognition of syntactic expressions called deontic operators. We defined a grammar and a set of Finite-State Transition Networks (FSTN) to automatically recognize deontic operators in Clinical Guidelines. We then implemented a dedicated FSTN parser that identifies deontic operators and marks up their occurrences in the document, thus producing a structured version of the Guideline. We evaluated our approach on a corpus (not used to define the grammar) of 5 Clinical Guidelines. As a result, 95.5% of the occurrences of deontic expressions are correctly marked up. The automatic detection of deontic operators can be a useful step to support Clinical Guidelines encoding.
authors.affiliation: Université Paris Descartes, Faculté de Médecine; INSERM, U729; SPIM, F-75006 Paris, France. Gersende.Georg@spim.jussieu.fr
authors.forename: Gersende
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Georg
authors.forename: Isabelle
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Colombet
authors.forename: Marie-Christine
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Jaulent
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D009989:Orthotic Devices; D010209:Paper; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D012984:Software