The Use of Morphosemantic Regularities in the Medical Vocabulary for Automatic Lexical Coding

Summary

The Neo-Latin portion of medical vocabulary exhibits morphosemantic regularities that make it possible to determine both English syntactic subclasses and medical semantic subclasses from formal properties of these lexical items alone. This paper describes an experimental program for the automatic creation of dictionary entries that exploits the formal regularities to obtain dictionary entries sufficient for computerized medical text analysis as presently carried out by the New York University Linguistic String Project (LSP) system. Although automatic dictionary preparation does not supersede manual classification, the program takes a considerable burden off the dictionary worker’s shoulders and speeds the costly preprocessing stages of computerized text analysis.

Der neo-lateinische Teil des medizinischen Vokabulars zeigt morphosemantische Gesetzmäßigkeiten, die es ermöglichen, sowohl englische syntaktische Untergruppen als auch medizinische semantische Untergruppen lediglich aufgrund der formalen Eigenschaften dieser lexikalischen Sachverhalte zu bestimmen.

In dieser Arbeit wird ein experimentelles Programm zur automatischen Herstellung von Wörterbucheintragungen beschrieben, welches die formalen Gesetzmäßigkeiten ausnutzt, um Wörterbucheintragungen zu erhalten, die für die automatisierte medizinische Textanalyse, wie sie derzeit durch das Linguistic String Project (LSP)-System der New York University durchgeführt wird, ausreichen. Obwohl die automatische Vorbereitung von Wörterbüchern die manuelle Klassifikation nicht ersetzt, entlastet das Programm die an einem Wörterbuch Arbeitenden erheblich und beschleunigt die teuren Vorstadien der automatisierten Textanalyse.

Key-Words:

Medical Terminology - Morphosemantic Analysis - Automated Dictionary Classification

Schlüssel-Wörter:

Medizinische Terminologie - morphosemantische Analyse - automatisierte Wörterbuchklassifikation

• References

• 1 Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary 25th edition. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders; 1974
• 2 Fitzpatrick E., Sager N.. The Lexical Subclasses of the Linguistic String Parser. American Journal of Computational Linguistics, microfiche 1974; 2 Reprinted in: String Program Reports 9, New York University Linguistic String pp. 322-374. Reading, Mass. Addison-Wesley 1981;
• 3 Friedman C, Sager N., Chi E., Marsh E., Christenson C, Lyman M.. Computer Structuring of Free Text Patient Data. Proceedings of the 7th Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care (SCAMC7). Washington, D.C.: October; 1983
• 4 Harris Z. S.. Mathematical Structures of Language. New York: Wiley Interscience 1968
• 5 Hirschman L., Sager N.. Automatic Information Formatting of a Medical Sublanguage. In Kittredge R., Lehrberger J.. (Eds) Sublanguage: Studies of Language in Restricted Semantic Domains, pp 27-80. Berlin: de Gruyter 1982;
• 6 Kittredge R.. Variation and Homogeneity of Sublanguages. In Kittredge R., Lehrberger J.. (Eds) Sublanguage: Studies of Language in Restricted Semantic Domains, pp. 108-137. Berlin: de Gruyter 1982;
• 7 Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. London Longman Ltd. 1978
• 8 Marchand H.. The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation. München: C. H. Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung 1969
• 9 Norton L. M., Pacak M. G.. Morphose-mantic Analysis of Compound Word Forms Denoting Surgical Procedures. Meth: Inform. Med 1983; 22: 29-36.
• 10 Pacak M. G., Norton L. M., Dunham G. S.. Morphosemantic Analysis of -ITIS Forms in Medical Language. Meth. Inform. Med 1980; 19: 99-105.
• 11 Pacak M. G., Pratt A. W.. Identification and Transformation of Terminal Morphemes in Medical English, Part II. Meth. Inform. Med 1978; 17: 95-100.
• 12 Pratt A. W., Pacak M. G.. Identification and Transformation of Terminal Morphemes in Medical English. Meth. Inform. Med 1969; 8: 84-90.
• 13 Sager N.. Syntactic Formatting of Science Information. AFIPS Conference Proceedings 41. pp 791-800 Montvale NJ. AFIPS Press 1972; Reprinted in Kittredge R., Lehrberger J.. (Eds) Sublanguage: Studies of Language in Restricted Semantic Domains, pp 9-26. Berlin: de Gruyter 1982;
• 14 Sager N.. Natural Language Information Processing: A Computer Grammar of English and its Applications. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley 1981
• 15 Sager N.. Natural Language Information Formatting: The Automatic Conversion of Texts to a Structured Data Base. In Yovits M. C.. (Ed.) Advances in Computers Vol 17, pp 89-162. New York: Academic Press 1978;
• 16 Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, 21st edit. Baltimore Williams and Wilkins Co. 1966
• 17 Webster’s Seventh Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield Mass.: G. & C. Merriam Company; 1967
• 18 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. Springfield Mass.: G. & C. Merriam Company; 1971
• 19 White C, Foster C. Automatic Parsing with a Hybrid Lexicon. In String Program Reports 13, New York University Linguistic String Project 1980
• 20 White C. The Linguistic String Project Dictionary for Automatic Text Analysis. Proceedings of the Workshop on Machine Readable Dictionaries Menlo Park: SRI International 1983