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Resume Cet article resume le travail de mise au point d’un outil d’analyse du contenu textuel de dossiers hospitaliers afin d’y detecter des indices permettant de suspecter des cas d’infections associees aux soins. Des mecanismes de traitement de l’anonymat, de la terminologie, des entites nommees, de la temporalite ont ete mis au point, ainsi qu’une caracterisation operationnelle des scenarios a risques. Les resultats obtenus et les suites envisagees sont decrits dans cet article.

Education and training are key elements of health system preparedness vis-à-vis chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) emergencies. Medical respondents need sufficient knowledge and skills to manage the human impact of CBRN events.The current study was designed to determine which competencies are needed by hospital staff when responding to CBRN emergencies, define educational needs to develop these competencies, and implement a suitable delivery method.This study was carried out from September 2014 to February 2015, using a three-step modified Delphi method. On the basis of international experiences, publications, and experts' consensus, core competencies for hospital staff - as CBRN casualty receivers - were determined, and training curricula and delivery methods were defined.The course consists of 10 domains. These are as follows: threat identification; health effects of CBRN agents; planning; hospital incident command system; information management; safety, personal protective equipment and decontamination; medical management; essential resources; psychological support; and ethical considerations. Expected competencies for each domain were defined. A blended approach was chosen.By identifying a set of core competencies, this study aimed to provide the specific knowledge and skills required by medical staff to respond to CRBN emergencies. A blended approach may be a suitable delivery method, allowing medical staff to attend the same training sessions despite different time zones and locations. The study output provides a CBRN training scheme that may be adapted and used at the European Union level.

International audience; The objective of the SYNODOS collaborative project was to develop a generic IT solution, combining a medical terminology server, a semantic analyser and a knowledge base. The goal of the project was to generate meaningful epidemiological data for various medical domains from the textual content of French medical records. In the context of this project, we built a care pathway oriented conceptual model and corresponding annotation method to develop and evaluate an expert system's knowledge base. The annotation method is based on a semi-automatic process, using a software application (MedIndex). This application exchanges with a cross-lingual multi-termino-ontology portal. The annotator selects the most appropriate medical code proposed for the medical concept in question by the multi-termino-ontology portal and temporally labels the medical concept according to the course of the medical event. This choice of conceptual model and annotation method aims to create a generic database of facts for the secondary use of electronic health records data.

This paper presents an unsupervised, all-words, word sense disambiguation system for English. The system associates a word with its meaning in a given context using an electronic dictionary as a tagged corpora in order to extract semantic disambiguation rules. The methodology attempts to avoid the data acquisition bottleneck observed in word sense disambiguation techniques. Semantic rules are used as input of a semantic application program encoding a linguistic strategy in order to select the best rule to apply. The semantic rule extraction process as well as the application program is described. The methodology is developed in a client/server architecture, which enables the treatment of large corpora. The evaluation of the system is then detailed and some possible extensions and perspectives are finally proposed.

Research on a number of developments in language technologies, targeted at improving patent processing procedures within patent offices and in subsequent patent database search systems, is described. Aspects of patent processing covered are (1) OCR correction, to assist the conversion of paper documents to electronic versions, and (2) text classification, to assist in the allocation of new patent applications to the correct technical experts. Aspects of patent searching covered are (3) terminology enrichment, linking keywords to IPC terms, (4) table and figure reference extraction, to enable the corresponding text to be located, and (5) multilingual information access, to help formulate queries in other languages for the search of documents in those languages, and then to provide contextual translation of key sections of the documents retrieved. The authors conclude that these types of technologies will support more sophisticated search activities, for example in patent information centres, to complement the low-cost or free offerings on the Internet.

Afin de traiter les corpus multilingues d'une maniere coherente, il est plus productif d'utiliser une approche independante de la langue pour le traitement automatique des langues naturelles, ce qui signifie que les outils elabores pour manipuler le langage sont independants des donnees qu'ils traitent. Au centre de recherche de Rank Xerox, les As. ont concu de tels outils en utilisant des transducteurs et des automates a etats finis. Dans cet article, ils presentent certains de ces outils (systemes de segmentation automatique, analyseurs morphologiques, etiquetage automatique des parties du discours) et decrivent quelques applications derivees de l'utilisation de ces outils et destinees a la reconnaissance de structures (extraction terminologique basee sur un corpus, aide a la comprehension et a la traduction, recherche d'information translinguistique)

Après une description succincte du modèle des grammaires catégo­rielles nous nous arrêtons sur le traitement des verbes dans le cadre du système GraCE. Ceci nous conduit à développer le concept linguistique de superposition. Ce concept rend compte du fait qu'un mot n'est pas attaché de façon rigide à un type donné. Nous montrons comment, dans le cadre catégoriel, cette notion nous permet de traiter des cas où il est impossible de combiner deux types entre eux. This paper presents a French categorial morpho-syntactic parser : the system GraCE. It focuses on the treatment of verbs. In the first section we give an overview on the categorial formalism. Then while presenting the treatment of verbs, we introduce the notion of superposition. This important linguistic phenomenon points out that words are not strictly attached to a given type. This enables us to resolve the problem of type incompatibility within the categorial framework.

Currently, extraction of data for epidemiological surveillance is severely limited by the lack of standardised structuring of medical records. The objective of this study is to describe a semi-automatic method for standardized coding of textual medical records for epidemiological use. In the context of the ALADIN-DTH research project, we are planning to develop a tool for detecting nosocomial infections. With that goal in mind we will ask physicians to manually code 2,000 hospital medical records using different appropriate medical terminologies (ICD10, SNOMED 3.5, ATC, CCAM, MeSH). A French automatic Multi-Terminology Health Concept Extractor (French acronym: ECMT) can offer a choice of labels and codes of different terminologies. This tool can be called on a distant server via an Internet connection thanks to an XML service. Among 3,450 medical expressions queried by users, the ECMT has proposed relevant codes for 70,5% of them (original formulation) and 87,7% of them after correction of the formulation by the annotator, this result ranging from 51,3% (bacteriological examinations) to 96,4% (symptoms/diagnoses). A multi-terminology health concept extractor is an interesting tool for standardized coding of textual data for epidemiological use.

Anonymization of personal data is a legal requirement for their use as part of a research project. In the context of developing a tool for detecting hospital-acquired infections, 2000 medical documents were needed for the research project ALADIN. To help annotators to anonymize this corpus of documents, a tool for the anonymization has been developed, relying on Natural Language Processing techniques. The recall, precision and F-score of the automatic phase of the anonymizer were respectively 79.7, 85.2 and 82.4%. The gold- standard used for the evaluation was the manual anonymization of the documents. The performance of the automatic anonymization can still be improved but the tool is already a considerable help in this process in terms of saving time and in terms of quality of anonymization (including the accuracy of labeling anonymized terms and computation of time duration).

This paper presents the lessons learned in experimenting with Thetis, an EC project focusing on the creation and localization of enhanced on-line pedagogical content for language learning in tourism industry. It is based on a general innovative approach to language learning that allows employees to acquire practical oral and written skills while navigating a relevant professional scenario. The approach is enabled by an underlying platform (EXILLS) that integrates virtual reality with a set of linguistic, technologies to create a new form of dynamic, extensible, goal-directed e-content.

E-learning paves the way to a new type of course, more student centred, granulized, on demand, and highly interactive. Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies associated with other multimedia technologies can help to address the major issues raised by this new type of courses: interaction, personalization and reliable information access. This paper presents Exills, a true e-learning solution which integrates natural language processing tools and virtual reality. Exills is unique in that unlike most of the language learning systems, it focuses on improving learners' performance rather than learners' competence.

International audience; This paper presents a lexical disambiguation system, initially developed for English and now adapted to French. This system associates a word with its meaning in a given context using electronic dictionaries as semantically annotated corpora in order to extract semantic disambiguation rules. We describe the rule extraction and application process as well as the evaluation of the system. The results for French give us insight information on some possible improvments of the nature and content of lexical resources adapted for disambiguation in this framework.; Cet article présente un système de désambiguïsation lexicale sémantique, conçu initialement pour l’anglais et à présent adapté à la désambiguïsation du français. La méthodologie développée repose sur l’utilisation d’un dictionnaire électronique comme un corpus sémantiquement étiqueté afin d’en extraire une base de règles de désambiguïsation sémantique. Ces règles permettent d’associer à un mot son sens compte tenu de son contexte. L’extraction et l’application des règles sont décrites en détail ainsi que l’évaluation du système. L’évaluation des résultats obtenus pour le français nous conduit à considérer un ensemble de perspectives concernant les ressources lexicales qui seraient les mieux adaptées à la tâche de désambiguïsation dans le cadre de cette méthodologie.

Most multi-word lexemes (MWLs) allow certain types of variation. This has to be taken into account for their description and their recognition in texts. We suggest to describe their syntactic restrictions and their idiosyncratic peculiarities with local grammar rules, which at the same time allow to express in a general way regularities valid for a whole class of MWLs. The local grammars can be written in a very convenient and compact way as regular expressions in the formalism IDAREX which uses a two-level morphology. IDAREX allows to define various types of variables, and to mix canonical and inflected word forms in the regular expressions.

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the concept of dynamic relaxation. The fact that most parsers perform poorly on large corpora is widely acknowledged. To extend the scope of the grammar, the chapter presents the notions of dynamic relaxation and structural distance, based on the relaxed approach of the PLNLP broad coverage systems. Adopting a corpus-based paradigm implies confrontation with the gap among languages as theoretically and computationally described, and as attested by real-life usage. There is only partial overlapping between the structures actually observed in corpora and those usually described in grammar theories and dealt with by NLP systems. The discrepancies between theoretical or computational models and actual language usage can be seen as resulting from the distinction between the core and the periphery of language proposed within the generative paradigm. Following this approach, the grammar consists of a core and a periphery, where the core determines the general properties of the grammar, and the periphery accommodates the exceptional or marked properties.

To deal with long-distance dependencies, Applicative Universal Grammar (AUG) proposes a new type of categorial rules, called superposition rules. We compare the AUG rules with the alternative rules of Steedman's Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) (Steedman, 1987, 1988, 1990; Szabolcsi, 1987; Ades and Steedman, 1982). In contrast to Steedman's rules, the AUG rules are free from inconsistencies in their semantic interpretation, free from spurious ambiguity. The superposition rules are based on the Theory of Type Superposition, established independently of the problem of long-distance dependencies and having a broad unifying power.

At the level of semantic relations, we are interested in finding the semantic links hidden in the syntax of a sentence. This involves, among other things, normalizing semantic structures across a wide range of paraphrases. The goal is achieved by taking the output of the preceding analysis components and modifying it with a “concept grammar,” written in PLNLP. The rules of this grammar are similar in form to the rules of preceding components; but they operate on different aspects of the common information structure, analyzing the relations between nodes in the sentence graph, and normalizing semantic structures and lexical relationships in a variety of syntactic domains, without losing access to the surface syntactic differences. This chapter shows how, starting from the argument structure output from PEGASUS, the concept grammar produces semantic graphs that preserve the broad-coverage, broad-domain characteristics of the entire system.

National audience; De nombreuses recherches ont depuis longtemps motivé l'utilisation d'ontologies pour répondre aux besoins de représentation du e-Commerce. Dans cet article, nous présentons ProVoc (Product Vocabulary), une ontologie ayant pour objectif de décrire des produits sur le Web. Complémentaire à GoodRelations (Hepp, 2008), l'ontologie au format du Web sémantique la plus utilisée dans le monde du e-Commerce, Provoc se concentre sur une représentation fine des produits et de leurs entités relatives (gammes des produits, composition des produits, etc.). L'utilisation conjointe des deux ontologies permet d'élargir l'espace des requêtes de l'utilisateur. Par exemple : « Quels sont les produits qui contiennent des ingrédients néfastes pour la santé ? Qui les vend ? ». Nous montrons par le biais de requêtes SPARQL que nos scénarios trouvent une formulation adéquate et une représentation pertinente avec ProVoc. Enfin, une application de veille stratégique dans le domaine de la cosmétique est présentée.

International audience; In order to improve documentation production and information retrieval for a better rail safety, several prototypes based on Natural Language Processing technologies and applied to SNCF prescriptive documentation were developed and assessed.; Des expérimentations basées sur des technologies de traitement automatique du langage ont été menées au sein d’un programme de sécurité ferroviaire et de simplification documentaire afin d’améliorer la recherche d’information et la rédaction dans les textes de prescription SNCF.