Term Identification Methods for Consumer Health Vocabulary Development

Reviewer: Patrick, Timothy[This item is a preserved copy and is not necessarily the most recent version. To view the current item, visit http://www.jmir.org/2007/1/e4/ ] Background: The development of consumer health information applications such as health education websites has motivated the research on consumer health vocabulary (CHV). Term identification is a critical task in vocabulary development. Because of the heterogeneity and ambiguity of consumer expressions, term identification for CHV is more challenging than for professional health vocabularies. Objective: For the development of a CHV, we explored several term identification methods, including collaborative human review and automated term recognition methods. Methods: A set of criteria was established to ensure consistency in the collaborative review, which analyzed 1893 strings. Using the results from the human review, we tested two automated methods—C-value formula and a logistic regression model. Results: The study identified 753 consumer terms and found the logistic regression model to be highly effective for CHV term identification (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve = 95.5%). Conclusions: The collaborative human review and logistic regression methods were effective for identifying terms for CHV development