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<Paper uid="A83-1021">
  <Title>Append/x: A Cane of MethAnol Poisoning</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="125" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
2. Zxtmtetattons?
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Non-medical audiences should be reminded of differing expectations regarding such meaning representation experiments. As computer scientists, two of us (MST &amp; DDS) &amp;quot;knew&amp;quot; that meaning could not be represented satisfactorily by words alone: words were ambiguous, in general. and, besides, syntax was a partner with semantics, and to separate the two was to grossly distort the meaning of either. 4 We regarded early efforts as potentially interesting from the point of view of statistical linquistics how did words and contexts associate? However.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> the medically trained member of the initial team (MSB) predicted the successful performance of RECONSIDER once he saw the results of some early word-counting experiments.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Later. SN, an internist with a background in mathematics, anticipated the performance limiting aspect of RECONSIDER without ever using the program! (He predicted that inadequacies in the knowledge base would be more important than any shortcomings in the algorithms by which descriptions of patients were &amp;quot;matched&amp;quot; w~th the descriptions of the diseases.) \]y &amp;quot;understands&amp;quot; a few hundred dineaJee in the field of '--'Iter- aal medicine \[19, 18. 20, 18, 14\]. 4A local example of failure m &amp;quot;~-text lear~hl~&amp;quot; WaS recently bro~l~tt to our attention \[13\]. \[n a search of docunnen~ in a daymblum collected for a m~ut regarding a large const~ction project, p~c/mo~ (the probability of * do.umeat beu~ relevant) wu no better than 80~ which hush: have been acceptable except for ~.he fact that the reea~ (the probability that ,.ha relevant docunten~ wli\] be reuneved) was no better than 20~!  -3. An Example of 'Structured Text' CMIT was designed first for human users, as a reference of standard disease names (in book form it is about the size of the World Almanac), and second for computer applications. (The RECONSIDER-formatted CKIT definition of .tet/~yl 0~co/wL, to~c~t~J appears in the appendix of this paper.) The &amp;quot;structure&amp;quot; imposed on CMIT definitions is Largely external to the language of those definitions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> First. the entire text of C~T iS organized in the aforementioned noTm~t~-c~tr~b~e form. the disease names being the nominals and the descriptions consisting of the attributes of the disease, s Second. each disease is assigned to one. or possibly two, bod~j s'tjsts~s:</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Fourth. within each :DaFt, the descending hierarchy of se~.ences, ct~zuaes, and phrases (all inferrable from punctuation) are used relatively consistently to denote appropriate &amp;quot;chunks&amp;quot; of meaning.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Thus, in this instance, structured tezt is tightly edited prose written in nominal-attribute form, employing external markers, and relatively consistent punctuation, style, and vocabu-Lary. Put differently. CMIT can be &amp;quot;structurally&amp;quot; parsed without the need to /ztfer any of the semantics from the text. (Again. a portion of this &amp;quot;parse&amp;quot; is what produces the &amp;quot;display&amp;quot; of the deflnLtaon of methyl -lcotwl, toz~c-iZy shown in the appendix.) ~/t~ we are le~n~ .~m ore&amp;quot; eva~ua,Aon, the rm~n~s of dmeeses, even when they are descnp~ve r~aw.es (as CM\[T zs deslff~ed to encotu-age), are not aJways sufficzent ,.o deter- re.he which d~ease ~ beLn 8 spoken o!. Without the descr~pt~orm (attributes) phymcmr~ world he u.nabLe ~.0 resolve the problems created by different ~\]'stems of disease nomencLa- tl~'e. SAn u'tcpca-tan~ feat'~u'e of the compu~.er readable vernon of CMIT is that it contm.ns references, men, on of which is aot m~de in the printed vermont</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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