An environment for document engineering of clinical guidelines

In this paper, we present the G-DEE system, a document engineering environment aimed at clinical guidelines. This system represents an extension of current visual interfaces for guidelines encoding, in that it supports automatic text processing functions which identify linguistic markers of document structure, such as recommendations, thereby decreasing the complexity of operations required by the user. Such markers are identified by shallow parsing of free text and are automatically marked up as an early step of document structuring. From this first representation, it is possible to identify elements of guidelines contents, such as decision variables, and produce elements of GEM encoding, using rules defined as XSL style sheets. We tested our automatic structuring system on a set of sentences extracted from French clinical guidelines. As a result, 97% of the occurrences of deontic operators and their scopes were correctly marked up. G-DEE can be used for various purposes, from research into guidelines structure to assisting the encoding of guidelines into a GEM format or into decision rules.