ABSTRACT
In the field of biomedical informatics, it is often necessary to extract medical terms from text and attach a nomenclature concept code to the extracted term. By doing so, concepts of interest contained in text can be retrieved regardless of the choice of words used to describe them. For example, hepatocellular carcinoma, liver cell cancer, liver cancer, and hcc might all be given the same code number in a neoplasm nomenclature. Documents using any of these terms can be collected and merged if all of the terms are annotated with the same concept code. A software product that computationally parses and codes medical text is called an autocoder or an automatic coder.
