  This paper presents a Lisp architecture for a portable NLP system, termed
LAPNLP, for processing clinical notes. LAPNLP integrates multiple standard,
customized and in-house developed NLP tools. Our system facilitates portability
across different institutions and data systems by incorporating an enriched
Common Data Model (CDM) to standardize necessary data elements. It utilizes
UMLS to perform domain adaptation when integrating generic domain NLP tools. It
also features stand-off annotations that are specified by positional reference
to the original document. We built an interval tree based search engine to
efficiently query and retrieve the stand-off annotations by specifying
positional requirements. We also developed a utility to convert an inline
annotation format to stand-off annotations to enable the reuse of clinical text
datasets with inline annotations. We experimented with our system on several
NLP facilitated tasks including computational phenotyping for lymphoma patients
and semantic relation extraction for clinical notes. These experiments
showcased the broader applicability and utility of LAPNLP.
