Entity normalization in a Spanish medical corpus using a UMLS-based lexicon: findings and limitations.

Entity normalization is a common strategy to resolve ambiguities by mapping all the synonym mentions to a single concept identifier in standard terminology. Normalizing medical entities is challenging, especially for languages other than English, where lexical variation is considerably under-represe...

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Publicado en:Language Resources & Evaluation Vol. 59; no. 2; pp. 1013 - 1042
Autores principales: Báez, Pablo, Campillos-Llanos, Leonardo, Núñez, Fredy, Dunstan, Jocelyn
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature Jun2025
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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      pub: Springer Nature
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        atl: Entity normalization in a Spanish medical corpus using a UMLS-based lexicon: findings and limitations.
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        au:
          Báez, Pablo
          Campillos-Llanos, Leonardo
          Núñez, Fredy
          Dunstan, Jocelyn
        affil:
          https://ror.org/047gc3g35 Center of Medical Informatics and Telemedicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Chile, Avda. Independencia 1027, 8380453, Santiago, RM, Chile
          https://ror.org/05y33vv83 Tecnología Médica, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad del Desarrollo, Avda. Plaza 680, 7610658, Las Condes, RM, Chile
          https://ror.org/02gfc7t72 Instituto de Lengua, Literatura y Antropología (ILLA), CSIC (Spanish National Research Council), Albasanz 26-28, 28037, Madrid, Spain
          https://ror.org/04teye511 Department of Language Sciences, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, RM, Chile
          https://ror.org/047gc3g35 Center for Mathematical Modeling (CNRS IRL 2807), University of Chile, Santiago, RM, Chile
          https://ror.org/04teye511 Department of Computer Science & Institute for Mathematical Computing, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, RM, Chile
          Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), Santiago, Chile
      su:
        Variation in language
        Romance languages
        Medical referrals
        Linguistic analysis
        Spanish language
      sug:
        subj:
          Variation in language
          Romance languages
          Medical referrals
          Linguistic analysis
          Spanish language
      keyword:
        Clinical text
        Communication and Culture Linguistics
        Entity linking
        Language
        Lexical variation
        Linguistic resources
        Medical lexicon
        Normalization
      ab: Entity normalization is a common strategy to resolve ambiguities by mapping all the synonym mentions to a single concept identifier in standard terminology. Normalizing medical entities is challenging, especially for languages other than English, where lexical variation is considerably under-represented. Here, we report a new linguistic resource for medical entity normalization in Spanish. We applied a UMLS-based medical lexicon (MedLexSp) to automatically normalize mentions from 2000 medical referrals of the Chilean Waiting List Corpus. Three medical students manually revised the automatic normalization. The inter-coder agreement was computed, and the distribution of concepts, errors, and linguistic sources of variation was analyzed. The automatic method normalized 52% of the mentions, compared to 91% after manual revision. The lowest agreement between automatic and automatic-manual normalization was observed for Finding, Disease, and Procedure entities. Errors in normalization were associated with ortho-typographic, semantic, and grammatical linguistic inadequacies, mainly of the hyponymy/hyperonymy, polysemy/metonymy, and acronym-abbreviation types. This new resource can enrich dictionaries and lexicons with new mentions to improve the functioning of modern entity normalization methods. The linguistic analysis offers insight into the sources of lexical variety in the Spanish clinical environment related to error generation using lexicon-based normalization methods. This article also introduces a workflow that can serve as a benchmark for comparison in studies replicating our analysis in Romance languages.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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      custom: Language Resources & Evaluation is a copyright of Springer, 2025. All Rights Reserved.
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