抄録
Toward the realization of a natural language understanding system for clinical records, the authors have analyzed a large number of discharge summaries (a kind of clinical record). In the records many Japanese compound nouns appear due to ellipsis. Therefore, it is very essential to the understanding system to cope with them. This paper describes a system to paraphrase compound nouns by restoring their elliptical constructions in use of their semantic categorie categories (Yokota, Nishimura, Shiraishi and Ryu 1994) according to the Mental-image directed semantic theory (Yokota 1988; Yokota, Shiraishi, Ryu, and Oda 1991b).This system consists of four major processors: “Word segmentation processor, ” “Restoration processor, ” “Hierarchical relation detector” and “Sentence generator”, and possesses two types of dictionary: “Word dictionary” and “Hierarchy dictionarv”. The fbrmer of the dictionaries assigns a semantic category, etc. to each noun, and the latter contains the hierarchic relations among the concepts of objects (one of the semantic categories of nouns). The experimental result of the system has proven to be fairly successful.
