The importance of semantics in search techniques is well known. This is especially true in medical terminologies, where semantics have been heavily utilized in developing ontology models for storing and retrieving important information. Incorporating the idea of concepts into semantics adds the much needed power to the development of highly effective search techniques.

This paper describes the development of a concept-based semantic search technique for retrieving information from clinical documents. The proposed technique is based on the semantic concept-enriched dependence model. The search procedure, as per the author’s claims, is based on MetaMaps and implicit dependencies. The authors describe a MetaMap as “a computer program that was developed ... for mapping concepts from [the Unified Medical Language System, UMLS] Metathesaurus from biomedical texts,” and an implicit dependency as a measure of the estimate of “the importance of the concepts.” The authors discuss the topic in detail by providing information on the experimentation that was conducted using the proposed technique. The elaborate presentation of the experimental results also helps to validate and substantiate the technique described in the paper.

Overall, this is a well-presented paper, although there is some room for improvement in grammar and language. Certainly, the strength of the paper is its technical depth. This manuscript could be used by a doctoral student working on improving search techniques for applications that deal with a medical vocabulary.