BibTeX

@inProceedings{kokkinakis-2013-figurative-168227,
	title        = {Figurative Language in Swedish Clinical Texts. Potsdam, Germany},
	abstract     = {Automated processing of clinical texts with the intention to link all important text fragments to various established terminologies and ontologies for relation or event extraction is commonly faced with various less exposed, and not so regularly discussed linguistically motivated issues that needs to be addressed. One of these issues is the usage of figurative language. Figurative language, that is the use of words that go beyond their ordinary meaning, is not only a linguistically complex and challenging problem but also a problem that causes great difficulty for the field of natural language processing (NLP), both for the processing of general language and of various sublanguages, such as clinical medicine. Therefore, a comprehensive model of e.g. clinical language processing needs to account for figurative language usage and this paper provides a description towards this goal. Since the empirical, clinical data used in the study is limited in size, there is no formal distinction made between different sub-classifications of figurative language. e.g., metaphors, idioms or simile. As a matter of fact, all these types of expressions form a continuum with fuzzy boundaries, and most of the NLP-oriented approaches discussed in the past have used either very large data for the analysis or hand annotates samples, a situation that has been prohibitive so far in our project. Therefore distinction is solely based on a more general level, namely between literal versus figurative language, and on a more quantitative and corpus-based level, supported with concrete examples that illustrate several types of figurative expressions in the clinical discourse. The main research questions that this paper asks are whether there are traces of figurative language (or at least a subset of such types) in patient doctor and patient nurse interactions, how can they be found in a convenient way and whether these are transferred in the electronic health records and to what degree. 
},
	booktitle    = {Computational Semantics in Clinical Text workshop. Part of the  10th International Conference on Computational Semantics},
	author       = {Kokkinakis, Dimitrios},
	year         = {2013},
	ISBN         = {978-1-62748-398-8},
	pages        = {6},
}