Matthew speaks at Oz-IA on semantic analysis

Oz-IA 2007 is coming soon — September 22nd and 23rd, in Sydney, Australia. With a little nudge from Andrew Boyd, I’ve decided to submit an abstract on my work on semantic analysis of medical restrictions text.

This will be the first time I’ve spoken at a conference, so I’m really looking forward to it.

This work has come some way since that post. I’ve now completed a series of prototype wireframes and presented them to our project’s leaders to gauge their opinion on turning the analysis into a tool for creating codified text in the future. You’ll be able to see these wireframes at Oz-IA.

The suggested interface breaks the creation of medical restrictions into discrete sections. For example: who can prescribe the drug; what they have to do to prescribe it; who can they prescribe the drug to and for what condition; etc. Each of these sections are then given a set of parameters — phrases made up of key nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs — informed by the semantic analysis.

The result for each section is sort of like those sets of fridge magnets with words, designed to be rearranged to form a sort of magnetic poetry.

This sort of interface will allow users to easily create the phrases they need to describe the restrictions for prescription, in a way that will be easily coded by the underlying system, and that reflects the way that users currently think about medical restrictions.

It’ll be very exciting to show this work in Sydney. I hope you can join me.

M