UNIFICATION OF TERMINOLOGY FOR ACCURATE COMMUNICATION AMONG EXPERTS - BASIC RESEARCH TO IMPROVE COMPUTABILITY BY STRUCTURING QUALITATIVE TEXTUAL DESCRIPTIONS

H. Hori¹, M. Matsushita², M. Miyamoto²

¹Biwako Professional University of Rehabilitation, Department of Physical Therapy, Faculty of Rehabilitation, Higashiohmi, Japan, ²Kansai University, Graduate School of Comprehensive Informatics, Takatsuki, Japan

Background: The terminology used by experts is difficult for the public to understand because of its specialized nature. Multiple terms are considered technical terms but are not unified, which can lead to misunderstandings in communication. The misunderstandings become more serious not only in the same industry but also in other industries. This occurs in various places, such as clinical and educational settings. To avoid such misunderstandings, it is desirable to unify terminology.

Purpose: Unification of terminology is desirable for accurate communication among professionals. The most accurate and unified terminology is the physiotherapist national exam questions. This study will extract the terms used in the national examinations, divide them into categories, tag them, eliminate duplications or terms that have the same meaning, and create a glossary of technical terms. The terminology will be created to bridge the gap between educational settings and conferences where peer experts and professionals from multiple professions interact. This study was positioned as basic research for structuring and making computable qualitative textual descriptions written in medical records and other documents.

Methods: (1) Five years' worth (1,000 questions) of past questions from 2016 to 2020 published by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare were used as basic data. (1) Unnecessary characters and symbols were removed from the data. (2) Morphological analysis was performed using MeCab, a morphological analysis engine, and ComeJisyo was used as a dictionary. (2) TermExtract is used to extract technical terms from the data obtained in (2). (3) Only nouns are extracted from the data and converted into words. (4) Multiple physiotherapists examine the search for and removal of duplicate descriptions and classify and tag the words.

Results: A total of 1,528 words were extracted from the past five years' national examinations. From there, the words were divided into 10 categories according to the scope of the national examinations. The result was 365 words for disease, 256 words for anatomy, 249 words for kinesiology, 175 words for assessment, 150 words for physiology, 86 words for exercise therapy, 79 words for prosthetics, 66 words for ADL, 16 words for physical therapy, and 86 words for others. Many words crossed categories, but these were tagged as secondary categories.

Conclusions: During the data classification process of this study, many words were found to have the same meaning but different descriptions, even for national exam terms. Unstable descriptions are a factor that increases the likelihood of misinterpretation. In this study, to unify technical terms, created terminology that was avoided and adjusted them. This unified vocabulary of words used in the national examinations served as the basis for the first steps toward structuring sentences and making them computable.

Implications: This research will not only improve interprofessional understanding by bridging minor differences in descriptions but will also contribute to eliminating notational quirks when dealing with large data sets and increasing the accuracy of input and output during programming.

Funding acknowledgements: This study is supported by the Kansai University Research Center for Biomedical Engineering and Pharmaceutical Sciences (BRIPS).

Keywords:
Unification of terminology
Interprofessional understanding
National examination

Topics:
Education: methods of teaching & learning
Education: continuing professional development
Education

Did this work require ethics approval? No

Reason: The data used in this study are widely published texts used in national examinations, which were morphologically analyzed in this study. No human subjects were used in the study, and it was not subject to any ethical review items. Therefore, it was not subject to ethical review.