A Large Rated Lexicon with French Medical Words

Abstract

Patients are often exposed to medical terms, such as anosognosia, myelodysplastic, or hepatojejunostomy, that can be semantically complex and hardly understandable by non-experts in medicine. Hence, it is important to assess which words are potentially non-understandable and require further explanations. The purpose of our work is to build specific lexicon in which the words are rated according to whether they are understandable or non-understandable. We propose to work with medical words in French such as provided by an international medical terminology. The terms are segmented in single words and then each word is manually processed by three annotators. The objective is to assign each word into one of the three categories: I can understand, I am not sure, I cannot understand. The annotators do not have medical training nor they present specific medical problems. They are supposed to represent an average patient. The inter-annotator agreement is then computed. The content of the categories is analyzed. Possible applications in which this lexicon can be helpful are proposed and discussed. The rated lexicon is freely available for the research purposes. It is accessible online at http://natalia.grabar.perso.sfr.fr/rated-lexicon.html

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