Present and future trends with NLP.

This paper reflects some desiderata on the role of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the coming years as foreseen in the medical domain. During the Medical Informatics Europe (MIE) conference in 1997, the NLP track was composed by numerous papers on natural language, knowledge representation, nomenclatures and classifications. Indeed, the medical community is looking for solutions for the future which are going to emerge from more powerful desktop and for which the successful softwares of tomorrow are not yet identified. Presently this same community's needs remains unsatisfied with healthcare professionals writing at best their patient medical records in a text processing system. We stand today closer to the typewriter than to any modern solution which could radically transform the treatment of information related to patients. What kind of hurdles are there still in front of us before we reach this new territory?