Word and object in disease descriptions
ACL '80 Proceedings of the 18th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
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RECONSIDER is an interactive diagnostic prompting program which uses simple information retrieval techniques to prompt a physician regarding possible diagnoses, given a list of positive patient findings. Its knowledge base consists of "structured text" definitions of 3262 diseases and a synonym dictionary Patient findings, and their synonyms, are matched against inverted files of terms from the disease descriptions, the number and selectivity of the patient findings matching terms in a given disease description determine that disease's "score", and the matched diseases are sorted on this score to form a preliminary differential diagnosis. Definitions of diseases can be referenced for viewing by name, or by their position in a differential. While its first formal evaluation is not yet complete, the performance of RECONSIDER continues to exceed the expectations of user and designer alike.