NAME

Lingua::ConText - Perl extension for finding the context of a word in a sentence.

SYNOPSIS

use Lingua::ConText qw( applyContext );

 
my $text = 'The patient denied a history of pneumonia.';
my $result = applyContext( 'pneumonia', $text );
print join "\n", @{$result}; 
# pneumonia
# The patient denied a history of pneumonia.
# negated
# historical
# patient

DESCRIPTION

This is a perl implementation of the ConText algorithm which uses a list of phrases to determine the context of a given concept within a sentence.

This is a port from the java code authored by Stephane Meystre, Julien Charles Thibault, Oscar Ferrandez Escamez made available online.

EXPORT

None by default.

applyContext( $concept, $sentence );

return [ 
  $concept, $sentence, $negation_context, 
  $temporality_context, $experiencer_context 
];

$negation_context; # affirmed, negated, possible
$temporality_context; # recent, hypothetical, historical
$experiencer_context; # patient, other

SEE ALSO

The ConText documentation and downloads for java implementation can be found here:

http://code.google.com/p/negex/

Background information:

Chapman WW, Dowling JN, Chu DL. ConText: An algorithm for identifying contextual features from clinical text. In: BioNLP Workshop of the Association for Computational Linguistics Prague, Czech Republic; 2007. p. 81-88.

Harkema H, Thornblade T, Dowling J, Chapman WW. Portability of ConText: An Algorithm for determining Negation, Experiencer, and Temporal Status from Clinical Reports. J Biomed Inform. 2009;42(5):839-851.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21459155

AUTHOR

Eduardo Iturrate, <ed@iturrate.com>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2013 by Eduardo Iturrate

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.8 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.