Consumer Health Vocabulary Development using a Systematic Approach
Speaker: Qing Zeng, PhD , Harvard Decision Systems Group
Date: March 29 2005
Time: 3:00PM to 4:15PM
Location: 32-250 Lounge
Host: Prof Peter Szolovits, CSAIL Clinical Decision Making Group
Contact: Fern DeOliveira, x3-5860, fern@csail.mit.edu
Relevant URL: http://www.consumerhealthvocab.org/Abstract:
Dozens of health vocabularies have been developed to represent the terms, concepts and concept relationships employed by health care providers, while no comprehensive or openly available health vocabularies focus on health care consumers.
We have conducted studies to examine the difference between lay and professional health language and started developing an open source Consumer Health Vocabulary (CHV). In developing the CHV, we took a systematic approach that subscribes to both the traditional and experimental philosophies in terminology construction. The traditional school of thought, developed by Eugen Wüster, puts an emphasis on the concept rather than the form and advocates objectivity. The experimental school of thought is influenced by cognitive linguistics and the empirical perspective and emphasizes practicality.
Our development is mostly driven by the practical needs of consumer health applications, which must inevitably use the varying forms and ambiguous/vague concepts that human beings use, but it is also firmly based in the rigorous quantitative analyses of text corpora that were actually generated by consumers.
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