title: Matching controlled vocabulary words.
abstract: This study examines an enabling condition for natural languages access to medical knowledge resources (Medline, CISMeF) indexed with controlled vocabularies (e.g., the MeSH): is the vocabulary of user queries comparable with that of the index terms? The two vocabularies were compared in their original form, then under incrementally normalized forms, using character-based normalizations then linguistic normalizations. Only 16.7% of the user vocabulary, in its original form, is in the MeSH. Progressive normalizations increase this proportion to 65.5%. Besides, if the frequencies of occurrence of words are taken into account, 89.3% of user word occurrences can be matched to MeSH words. This shows the interest of taking into account further matching methods between queries and index terms than those presented here.
authors.affiliation: STIM/DSI, Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, France. ngr@biomath.jussieu.fr
authors.forename: Natalia
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Grabar
authors.forename: Pierre
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Zweigenbaum
authors.forename: Lina
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Soualmia
authors.forename: Stéfan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Darmoni
mesh_terms: D005602:France; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet; D016239:MEDLINE; D008490:Medical Informatics; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled