For millions of people in less resourced regions of the world, text messages (SMS) provide the only regular contact with their doctor. Classifying messages by medical labels supports rapid responses to emergencies, the early identification of epidemics and everyday administration, but challenges include text brevity, rich morphology, phonological variation, and limited training data. This papers presents a novel system that addresses these, working with a clinic in rural Malawi and texts in the Chichewa language.
www.robertmunro.com/research/munro10chichewa.pdf