Just Released Paper: "Computer-Assisted Update of a Consumer Health Vocabulary Through Mining of Social Network Data"

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Author: Kristina M Doing-Harris^*, BCompSci MA MS PhD; Qing Zeng-Treitler^*, PhD
Affiliation (Both Authors) University of Utah, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Salt Lake City, UT, United States
Source: Journal of Internet Medical Research (13.2, 2011)

ABSTRACT

Background: Consumer health vocabularies (CHVs) have been developed to aid consumer health informatics applications. This purpose is best served if the vocabulary evolves with consumers’ language.
Objective: Our objective was to create a computer assisted update (CAU) system that works with live corpora to identify new candidate terms for inclusion in the open access and collaborative (OAC) CHV.
Methods: The CAU system consisted of three main parts: a Web crawler and an HTML parser, a candidate term filter that utilizes natural language processing tools including term recognition methods, and a human review interface. In evaluation, the CAU system was applied to the health-related social network website PatientsLikeMe.com. The system’s utility was assessed by comparing the candidate term list it generated to a list of valid terms hand extracted from the text of the crawled webpages.
Results: The CAU system identified 88,994 unique terms 1- to 7-grams (“n-grams” are n consecutive words within a sentence) in 300 crawled PatientsLikeMe.com webpages. The manual review of the crawled webpages identified 651 valid terms not yet included in the OAC CHV or the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus, a collection of vocabularies amalgamated to form an ontology of medical terms, (ie, 1 valid term per 136.7 candidate n-grams). The term filter selected 774 candidate terms, of which 237 were valid terms, that is, 1 valid term among every 3 or 4 candidates reviewed.
Conclusion: The CAU system is effective for generating a list of candidate terms for human review during CHV development.

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