A data-driven approach for extracting "the most specific term" for ontology development

AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2003:2003:579-83.

Abstract

We present a data-driven approach to extract the "most specific" terms relevant to an ontology of functioning, disability and health. The algorithm is a combination of statistical and linguistic approaches. The statistical filter is based on the frequency of the content words in a given text string; the linguistic heuristic is an extension of existing algorithms but goes beyond noun phrases and is formulated as a "complete syntactic node". Thus, it can be applied to any syntactic node of interest in the particular domain. Two test sets were marked by three experts. Test set 1 is a well-constructed text from pain abstracts; test set 2 is actual medical reports. Results are reported as recall, precision, F-score and rate of valid terms in false positives. A limitation of the current research is the relatively small test set.

Publication types

  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Health
  • Linguistics
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Statistics as Topic
  • Vocabulary, Controlled*