A Large Rated Lexicon with French Medical Words

A Large Rated Lexicon with French Medical Words Natalia Grabar1, Thierry Hamon2 1CNRS, UMR 8163, F-59000 Lille, France; Univ. Lille, UMR 8163 - STL - Savoirs Textes Langage, F-59000 Lille, France 2LIMSI, CNRS, Universit´e Paris-Saclay, Bˆat 508, rue John von Neumann, Campus Universitaire, F-91405 Orsay Universit´e Paris 13 - Sorbonne Paris Cit´e, 99 avenue J.B. Cl´ement, F-93430 Villetaneuse, France natalia.grabar@univ-lille3.fr, hamon@limsi.fr 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. Keywords: Medical area, Medical terminology, Readability, Annotation, Inter-annotator agreement, French 1. Introduction The medical field has a very specific terminology (anosog- nosia, myelodysplastic, hepatojejunostomy or anastomo- sis) commonly used by medical professionals. For its cor- rect understanding, an extensive knowledge is required, as indeed it appears difficult to understand information con- tained in drug package inserts (Patel et al., 2002), in web- sites (Rudd et al., 1999; Berland et al., 2001; McCray, 2005; Oregon Practice Center, 2008), and more generally in patients and medical doctors communication (McCray, 2005; Jucks and Bromme, 2007; Tran et al., 2009). In this work, we present a lexicon with French medical words, which have been rated by human annotators on a scale with three positions: I can understand, I am not sure, I cannot understand. Study of the understanding of words used in medical field is the first step towards the simplifica- tion of medical texts. Indeed, before the simplification can be performed, it is necessary to know which textual units may show understanding difficulty and should be simpli- fied. 2. Related Work The understanding of words is a complex notion closely linked to different research fields, such as linguistics (Sec- tion 2.1.), psycholinguistics (Section 2.2.) and Natural Lan- guage Processing (NLP) (Section 2.3.). 2.1. Linguistics In linguistics, the question is closely related to the lexical complexity and composition. It has been indeed observed that several factors may be involved in semantic complex- ity: 1. Knowledge of the components of complex words, which permits to correctly segment the words …

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