Abstract
A data acquisition tool which will extract pertinent diagnostic information from radiology reports has been designed and implemented. Pertinent diagnostic information is defined as that clinical data which is used by the HELP medical expert system. The program uses a memory based semantic parsing technique to “understand” the text. Moreover, the memory structures and lexicon necessary to perform this action are automatically generated from the diagnostic knowledge base by using a special purpose compiler. The result is a system where data extraction from free text is directed by an expert system whose goal is diagnosis.