A term extraction tool for expanding content in the domain of functioning, disability, and health: proof of concept

Among the challenges in developing terminology systems is providing complete content coverage of specialized subject fields. This paper reports on a term extraction tool designed for the development and expansion of terminology systems concerned with functioning, disability, and health. Content relevant to this domain is the emphasis of the foci and targets of many nursing terminologies. We extend previously published term extraction algorithms by applying two filters. The first filter is based on the raw frequency of the content words in the lexical string under consideration. The second filter applies the notion of a complete syntactic node to discover relevant noun or verb phrases. While we report on a limited corpus (30,607 words comprising 4103 terms from 60 dismissal note summaries), the recall, precision, and F-measures we observed are encouraging and suggest continued development and testing of the tool is merited. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.