Affiliations: Leiden University Medical Centre, Department of
Clinical Informatics, Leiden, The Netherlands | Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information,
Nijmegen, The Netherlands | Leiden Centre for Linguistics, Leiden, The
Netherlands
Abstract: In the context of patients communicating about their disease, there
are several channels along which this can be done. Most of these channels do
not take the patient as primary input, but provide authoritative information.
The Narrator system supplies patients with information extracted from personal
stories in plain text format called "narratives". These will be processed and
stored using techniques from both Information Retrieval and Natural Language
Processing. As such, the system will be set up as a toolbox implementing
different approaches while a Service Oriented Architecture provides the
framework for integration. In this paper such approaches are described
together with efforts to combine them within a suitable architecture.
Furthermore, some of the important implementation details are discussed. As a
starting point for the system, experiments have been carried out with initial
narratives, the results of which are discussed.
Keywords: computational linguistics, information retrieval, probabilistic methods, semantic web
