Matching controlled vocabulary words.
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.
Grabar
Natalia
N
STIM/DSI, Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, France. ngr@biomath.jussieu.fr
Zweigenbaum
Pierre
P
Soualmia
Lina
L
Darmoni
Stéfan
S
D005602:France; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet; D016239:MEDLINE; D008490:Medical Informatics; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled