title: Identifying concepts in medical knowledge.
abstract: The barrier word method of identifying nominal phrases in text, using a very long barrier word list, was evaluated in two different sets of text. In a sample of 10 paragraphs from the Medical Knowledge Self-Assessment Program of the American College of Physicians, the yield of nominal phrases as a percent of total chunks isolated was 66%. Some 500,000 chunks were isolated from Principles and Practice of Oncology (PPO). 38% of these chunk-occurrences were of chunks which matched to 10,000 concept names in Meta-1.4, the most recent version of the UMLS Metathesaurus. 50 paragraphs from PPO were chosen at random. Co-occurrences of concepts in those paragraphs were reviewed. 42 of the paragraphs had unique or infrequently occurring co-occurrences which described closely the major thrust of the paragraph.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medicine, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, Georgia 30912 USA.
authors.forename: S J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Nelson
authors.forename: N E
authors.initials: NE
authors.lastname: Olson
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Fuller
authors.forename: M S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Tuttle
authors.forename: W G
authors.initials: WG
authors.lastname: Cole
authors.forename: D D
authors.initials: DD
authors.lastname: Sherertz
mesh_terms: D008495:Medical Oncology; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D017432:Unified Medical Language System