From Annotated Clinical Narratives to Ontology: Structuring Brazilian Portuguese Clinical Data

Fernando Henrique Moura de Oliveira, Cleyton Mário de Oliveira Rodrigues


Abstract
Clinical NLP for Brazilian Portuguese remains limited by the lack of semantically structured resources that support interoperability and downstream health applications. Although existing corpora provide annotated clinical narratives, their flat annotation schemes restrict semantic expressiveness and alignment with standardized terminologies. In this work, we present a lightweight domain ontology that models clinical entities, contextual qualifiers, and semantic relations in Brazilian Portuguese texts. The ontology is derived from the original corpus annotations and conceptually aligned with standards to enhance interoperability while preserving corpus-specific semantics. This work establishes foundational infrastructure for Portuguese clinical NLP, supporting tasks such as entity normalization, semantic search, and ontology-guided annotation.
Anthology ID:
2026.propor-2.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 2
Month:
April
Year:
2026
Address:
Salvador, Brazil
Editors:
Marlo Souza, Iria de-Dios-Flores, Diana Santos, Larissa Freitas, Jackson Wilke da Cruz Souza, Eugénio Ribeiro
Venue:
PROPOR
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
128–134
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-2.20/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fernando Henrique Moura de Oliveira and Cleyton Mário de Oliveira Rodrigues. 2026. From Annotated Clinical Narratives to Ontology: Structuring Brazilian Portuguese Clinical Data. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 2, pages 128–134, Salvador, Brazil. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Annotated Clinical Narratives to Ontology: Structuring Brazilian Portuguese Clinical Data (Oliveira & Rodrigues, PROPOR 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-2.20.pdf