Adecuación automática de términos biomédicos para personas no expertasel caso de los informes médicos

Abstract

The terminology used in specialized medical texts puts patients at a disadvantage, who do not always understand what they read because they lack the necessary knowledge. This doctoral thesis describes an applied research that relies on the Communicative Theory of Terminology (Cabré, 1999), specifically the Principle of adequacy, as the theoretical foundation. Its objective is to automatically generate more understandable medical reports for non-experts by adapting the terminology contained in them. To achieve it, a study of the needs of the target audience was carried out; and based on this; a computer tool to build an enriched version from an original medical report was developed. This tool applies lexical simplification techniques and uses existing clinical terminology resources. The evaluation findings show that people understood the medical report enriched by our tool better compared to the original medical report. We thus confirm the importance of adapting the terminology to the target audience and the feasibility of using information technologies to do so automatically.