Medical linguistics: automated indexing into SNOMED.

This paper reviews the state of the art in processing medical language data. The area is divided into the topics: (1) morphologic analysis, (2) syntactic analysis, (3) semantic analysis, and (4) pragmatics. Additional attention is given to medical nomenclatures and classifications as the bases of (automated) indexing procedures which are required whenever medical information is formalized. These topics are completed by an evaluation of related data structures and methods used to organize language-based medical knowledge.