Inventors:
Harry Lessinger - Portland OR, US
Ronald George Fenili - Enumclaw WA, US
International Classification:
G06N 5/00
Abstract:
For various purposes, medical reports and other natural-language texts are assigned discrete codes. Different methods of assigning codes, intended to produce the same results, often fail to assign the same code to the same input. To improve the consistency and accuracy of this coding process and produce a useful, concrete and tangible result, the embodiment of the present invention electronically assigns to each text a code that is selected from candidate codes produced by multiple pre-existing coding processes, automatic and/or manual. Methods are provided for choosing the code that is, by various criteria, considered most likely to be correct because it represents the best compromise between possible alternative codes. While the disclosure focuses on medical coding procedures, the invention disclosed herein may be applicable and adaptable to classification of texts or other data for various clinical, scientific, or non-scientific applications.