Summary
Objectives: This article aims at an analysis of ways of producing documents (such as findings
or referral letters) in clinical medicine. Special emphasis is given to the question
of whether the field of “Natural Language Generation” (NLG) can provide new approaches
to ameliorate the current situation.
Methods: In order to assess the currently used techniques in text production, an analysis
of commercially available systems was performed in addition to an extensive review
of the literature. The sketch of current NLG approaches is also based on a literature
review.
To estimate the applicability of several techniques to clinical documents, a typology
of documents in clinical medicine was developed, based on rhetorical structure theory,
speech act theory and certain recurrent linguistic phenomena exposed in the said documents.
Results: Current ways of producing text for documents in medicine are less than optimal in
several respects. The field of NLG draws on the idea of generating text from a conceptual
representation of not only certain facts, but also knowledge about how to express
them via (written) language.
Unfortunately, NLG does not yet offer “ready-to-run” solutions for the automatic production
of most of the document types in the given typology.
It seems, however, highly plausible that the demands of medical informatics for these
kinds of systems will be satisfiable as NLG matures.
Conclusions: NLG offers a promising way of generating text for clinical documents, a problem of
enormous economical importance. The medical informatics community should therefore
commit itself to the idea of NLG in medicine.
Keywords
Natural language generation - clinical documents - document typology
