The natural language processing of medical databases.

The consideration of natural language as a domain for computer processing has been one of the long-term projects in the history of data processing. Computers were developed in the late 40's and early 50's in the United States and from the very beginning there was a desire and intent that someday the computer would handle speech and be able to understand normal English literature and text with the coherency of a student or perhaps even an expert. Such breakthroughs have also been anticipated in the medical area. This paper will present a series of design specifications that facilitate the processing of natural language medical databases. Using these techniques it will be possible to expand the use of our traditional tools and exploit the effort that has been invested in these literary creations.