Automated access to a large medical dictionary: online assistance for research and application in natural language processing.

Online dictionaries can be important tools for research and application in natural language processing. This paper describes work with a machine-readable version of "Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary". First the characteristics of the dictionary are briefly described, and then the complex process of converting the tape to an online interactive dictionary is discussed. The results of several experiments in automatically deriving information from the online dictionary are presented, and the paper ends with a discussion of the use of the online dictionary as a tool in the development of a natural language processing system designed for the biomedical domain.