Exploring Adjectival Modification in Biomedical Discourse across Two Genres

Objectives: To explore the phenomenon of adjectival modification in biomedical discourse across two genres: the biomedical literature and patient records. Methods: Adjectival modifiers are removed from phrases extracted from two corpora (three million noun phrases extracted from MEDLINE, on the one hand, and clinical notes from the Mayo Clinic, on the other). The original phrases, the adjectives extracted, and the resulting demodified phrases are compared across the two corpora after normalization. Quantitative comparisons (frequency of occurrence) are performed on the whole domain