Keynote: Apache clinical Text Analysis and Know-
ledge Extraction System (cTAKES)
Abstract
The presentation will focus on methods and software development behind the
cTAKES platform. An overview of the modules will set the stage, followed by
more in-depth discussion of some of the methods and evaluations of select mod-
ules. The second part of the presentation will shift to software development
topics such as optimization and distributed computing including UIMA inte-
gration, UIMA-AS, as well as our plans for UIMA-DUCC integration. A live
demo of cTAKES will conclude the talk.

About the speakers
Pei Chen is a Vice President of Apache Software Foundation, leading the top-
level cTAKES project1 . He is also a lead application development specialist at
the Informatics Program at Boston Childrens Hospital/Harvard Medical School.
Mr. Chen’s interests lie in building practical applications using machine learning
techniques. He has a passion for the end-user experience and has a background
Computer Science/Economics. Mr. Chen is a firm believer in the open source
community contributing to cTAKES as well as other Apache Software Founda-
tion projects.

Guergana Savova, Ph.D. is member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School
and Childrens Hospital Boston. Her research interest is in natural language
processing (NLP), especially as applied to the text generated by physicians (the
clinical narrative) focusing on higher level semantic and discourse processing
which includes topics such as named entity recognition, event recognition, rela-
tion detection, and classification including co-reference and temporal relations.
The methods are mostly machine learning spanning supervised, lightly super-
vised, and completely unsupervised. Her interest is also in the application of
the NLP methodologies to biomedical use cases. Dr. Savova has been leading
the development and is the principal architect of cTAKES. She holds a Mas-
ters of Science in Computer Science and a PhD in Linguistics with a minor in
Cognitive Science from University of Minnesota.




  1 http://ctakes.apache.org/