title: Tailoring vocabularies for NLP in sub-domains: a method to detect unused word sense.
abstract: We developed a method to help tailor a comprehensive vocabulary system (e.g. the UMLS) for a sub-domain (e.g. clinical reports) in support of natural language processing (NLP). The method detects unused sense in a sub-domain by comparing the relational neighborhood of a word/term in the vocabulary with the semantic neighborhood of the word/term in the sub-domain. The semantic neighborhood of the word/term in the sub-domain is determined using latent semantic analysis (LSA). We trained and tested the unused sense detection on two clinical text corpora: one contains discharge summaries and the other outpatient visit notes. We were able to detect unused senses with precision from 79% to 87%, recall from 48% to 74%, and an area under receiver operation curve (AUC) of 72% to 87%.
authors.affiliation: Dep. Ing. Electrica, Fac. de Ingenieria Universidad de Concepcion, Concepcion, Chile.
authors.forename: Rosa L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Figueroa
authors.forename: Qing
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zeng-Treitler
authors.forename: Sergey
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Goryachev
authors.forename: Eduardo P
authors.initials: EP
authors.lastname: Wiechmann
mesh_terms: D019540:Area Under Curve; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D012372:ROC Curve; D012660:Semantics; D017432:Unified Medical Language System; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled