Dynamic Generation of a Table of Contents with Consumer-Friendly Labels

Consumers increasingly look to the Internet for health information, but available resources are too difficult for the majority to understand. Interactive tables of contents (TOC) can help consumers access health information by providing an easy to understand structure. Using natural language processing and the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), we have automatically generated TOCs for consumer health information. The TOC are categorized according to consumer-friendly labels for the UMLS semantic types and semantic groups. Categorizing phrases by semantic types is significantly more correct and relevant. Greater correctness and relevance was achieved with documents that are difficult to read than with those at an easier reading level. Pruning TOCs to use categories that consumers favor further increases relevancy and correctness while reducing structural complexity

Medical WordNet: A new methodology for the construction and validation of information resources for consumer health

A consumer health information system must be able to comprehend both expert and non-expert medical vocabulary and to map between the two. We describe an ongoing project to create a new lexical database called Medical WordNet (MWN), consisting of medically relevant terms used by and intelligible to non-expert subjects and supplemented by a corpus of natural-language sentences that is designed to provide medically validated contexts for MWN terms. The corpus derives primarily from online health information sources targeted to consumers, and involves two sub-corpora, called Medical FactNet (MFN) and Medical BeliefNet (MBN), respectively. The former consists of statements accredited as true on the basis of a rigorous process of validation, the latter of statements which non-experts believe to be true. We summarize the MWN / MFN / MBN project, and describe some of its applications

Adverse Drug Event Detection, Causality Inference, Patient Communication and Translational Research

Adverse drug events (ADEs) are injuries resulting from a medical intervention related to a drug. ADEs are responsible for nearly 20% of all the adverse events that occur in hospitalized patients. ADEs have been shown to increase the cost of health care and the length of stays in hospital. Therefore, detecting and preventing ADEs for pharmacovigilance is an important task that can improve the quality of health care and reduce the cost in a hospital setting. In this dissertation, we focus on the development of ADEtector, a system that identifies ADEs and medication information from electronic medical records and the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System reports. The ADEtector system employs novel natural language processing approaches for ADE detection and provides a user interface to display ADE information. The ADEtector employs machine learning techniques to automatically processes the narrative text and identify the adverse event (AE) and medication entities that appear in that narrative text. The system will analyze the entities recognized to infer the causal relation that exists between AEs and medications by automating the elements of Naranjo score using knowledge and rule based approaches. The Naranjo Adverse Drug Reaction Probability Scale is a validated tool for finding the causality of a drug induced adverse event or ADE. The scale calculates the likelihood of an adverse event related to drugs based on a list of weighted questions. The ADEtector also presents the user with evidence for ADEs by extracting figures that contain ADE related information from biomedical literature. A brief summary is generated for each of the figures that are extracted to help users better comprehend the figure. This will further enhance the user experience in understanding the ADE information better. The ADEtector also helps patients better understand the narrative text by recognizing complex medical jargon and abbreviations that appear in the text and providing definitions and explanations for them from external knowledge resources. This system could help clinicians and researchers in discovering novel ADEs and drug relations and also hypothesize new research questions within the ADE domain

Dictionaries in the European Enlightenment: a testimony to the civilization of its time and the foundations of modern Europe

The text presents a plan for an international and multidisciplinary research project that is under preparation now and which is looking for collaborators from other universities or research centers. It aims to investigate the role that played monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual dictionaries published in the 18th century in the constitution of modern Europe as we know it now. It is well known that in the 18th century there appeared many dictionaries in various European countries. These dictionaries were mainly monolingual but there appeared many bilingual or plurilingual ones as well. They had a wide range of functions: linguistic (to write and understand texts), but also symbolic, representing the development and the level of civilization and prestige that a given language of culture had in times previous to 19th-century European linguistic nationalisms. Another aspect is text-oriented and text-based: the 18th-century dictionaries used to be built on relatively large sources of contemporary texts and they reflected the level of knowledge in various subjects. Therefore, they can be considered testimonies of contemporary linguistic thinking and the applied linguistics, but at the same time, they resume the development of science, legal thought, political science, etc., illustrating how knowledge spread in the Enlightenment at the international level. The project seeks to unite researchers dedicated to the linguistic historiography of philologies of European languages, historians of natural sciences, law, and social and political history, among other disciplines. It aims to offer a map of the intellectual and political globalization that began to take place in the 18th century as it is reflected in its dictionaries. The project currently counts with a small group of researchers from linguistic historiography of Romance languages. Researchers of the historiography of other European philologies are welcome and needed, and so are historians of natural and social sciences specialized in the 18th century. The main aim of the project is to stop working in parallel, horizontal and vertical, tunnels and to form a network, necessary for this type of transdisciplinary research