Natural language processing for medical data

Natural language is highly ambiguous and the sense of a word heavily depends on the context it appears in. While slight uncertainties are acceptable for the texts you read on a daily basis, they can lead to fatalities in medical contexts. This talks gives an introduction to the underlying problem, word sense ambiguity, and the technical approach aiming to resolve it – entity linking. We highlight the crucial challenges that we need to overcome when dealing with German data in practical examples and show how we integrate those solutions in our product: damedic code.