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Article published In:
Computational terminology and filtering of terminological information
Edited by Patrick Drouin, Natalia Grabar, Thierry Hamon, Kyo Kageura and Koichi Takeuchi
[Terminology 24:1] 2018
► pp. 41–65

Clinical sublanguages

Vocabulary structure and its impact on term weighting

| KU Leuven
| KU Leuven
Due to its specific linguistic properties, the language found in clinical records has been characterized as a distinct sublanguage. Even within the clinical domain, though, there are major differences in language use, which has led to more fine-grained distinctions based on medical fields and document types. However, previous work has mostly neglected the influence of term variation. By contrast, we propose to integrate the potential for term variation in the characterization of clinical sublanguages. By analyzing a corpus of clinical records, we show that the different sections of these records vary systematically with regard to their lexical, terminological and semantic composition, as well as their potential for term variation. These properties have implications for automatic term recognition, as they influence the performance of frequency-based term weighting.
Keywords: clinical sublanguage, term variation, electronic health records, Dutch
Article outline
  • 1.Background
  • 2.Related research
  • 3.Sublanguages, semantic classes and variation types
    • 3.1Sublanguages
    • 3.2Classes of medical concepts
    • 3.3Types of variation
  • 4.Corpus study 1: Characterization of sublanguages across sections
    • 4.1Corpus characteristics
    • 4.2Preprocessing
    • 4.3Annotation procedure and feature set
    • 4.4Research questions of corpus study 1
    • 4.5Results of corpus study 1
      • 4.5.1Global lexical structure
      • 4.5.2Distribution of semantic types across sections
      • 4.5.3Distribution of term types across sections
    • 4.6Discussion of corpus study 1
  • 5.Corpus study 2: Impact of vocabulary structure on frequency-based term weighting
    • 5.1Research questions of corpus study 2
    • 5.2Corpus and preprocessing
    • 5.3Term filtering
    • 5.4Results of corpus study 2
      • 5.4.1Precision
      • 5.4.2Recall
    • 5.5Discussion of corpus study 2
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 31 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00013.gro
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