// Define some global attributes
include::_globattr.adoc[]

Document preprocessor
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Introduction
^^^^^^^^^^^^
This component provides a <<cda_cas_initializer,CdaCasInitializer>>
annotator that transforms a Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)
document into plain text, provided the CDA document conforms to the
DTD resource.

As part of the conversion to plain text, section (segment) markers are
inserted into the text and hyphens are inserted into words that should
be hyphenated. The resulting text is stored in a new View, which has
its own Sofa.

Sections are detected and Segment (aka section) annotations are added
to the CAS. Document level data is extracted and stored in the CAS as
Property annotations.

NOTE: This does not handle all CDA documents -- the CDA document must
conform to the DTD `resources/cda/NotesIIST_RTF.DTD`.


Analysis engines (annotators)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
- *AggregateAE.xml*
+
The file +desc/AggregateAE.xml+ defines a ``pipeline'' for
preprocessing documents. The ``pipeline'' is a simple pipeline with
only one delegate analysis engine (one annotator), the
CdaCasInitializer, and is included for testing. Typically the
+CdaCasInitializer.xml+ descriptor is included in a more complete
pipeline rather than using the AggregateAE.xml descriptor that is in
this project.
+
- [[cda_cas_initializer]] *CdaCasInitializer.xml*
+
The CdaCasInitializer descriptor defines the analysis engine
(annotator) for preprocessing documents. It creates a plain text view
from a CDA view. The plain text view can then be annotated for tokens,
parts of speech, chunks, etc.
+
*Parameters*::
  (none)
