Overview of Linguistic Information

This chapter provides a brief overview of linguistic information, and its relevance to clinical text processing. The contents of this chapter will be familiar to the readers who had to identify the words that form a unit with specific function within a hierarchical structure in the sentences and draw parse trees to describe the hierarchical syntactic structure. The chapter serves as a guide, provides references to in-depth studies of specific linguistic topics, and ties the well-known linguistic notions to clinical text, while emphasizing the importance of linguistic knowledge in clinical text processing. The chapter starts with the description of medical sublanguages.