Intervocabulary Mapping Within the UMLS: The Role of Lexical Matching

摘要

Within the NLM's UMLS Project, one challenge is mapping concepts from one information resource to another. While a complete solution to this problem requires construction of a comprehensive biomedical thesaurus, the present research provides evidence that considerable progress can be made with a straightforward lexical approach. Furthermore, such a lexical approach is the only practical way to begin construction of, and maintain, any such thesaurus. Related research has demonstrated the regularity of word usage within the context of biomedicine. This regularity suggests that mapping between biomedical information resources that have a constrained vocabulary can use lexical matching techniques with considerable success. A method has been developed to map ‘phrases’ from candidate sources to MeSH. In one experiment, this method attempts to map 834 disease names from the disease descriptions composed at UCSF for the UMLS. In a second experiment, the same method attempts to map disease attributes from these diseases.