Temporal reasoning over clinical text: the state of the art.

OBJECTIVES: To provide an overview of the problem of temporal reasoning over clinical text and to summarize the state of the art in clinical natural language processing for this task. TARGET AUDIENCE: This overview targets medical informatics researchers who are unfamiliar with the problems and applications of temporal reasoning over clinical text. SCOPE: We review the major applications of text-based temporal reasoning, describe the challenges for software systems handling temporal information in clinical text, and give an overview of the state of the art. Finally, we present some perspectives on future research directions that emerged during the recent community-wide challenge on text-based temporal reasoning in the clinical domain.