Change of biomedical domain terminology over time

Abstract

Biomedical text processing is relying heavily on terminological resources. Independently of the method used for creating terminologies, either automatically extracted from a domain corpus or human crafted, there is one aspect of which is rarely considered – that terms evolve over time. Terms in the domain literature change due to many factors: new factual evidence, proposing new hypothesis or denying old ones, a shift towards increasing specificity, variation in expression, different people working independently on the same novel phenomenon, etc. This paper reports an experimental investigation carried out on biomedical domain literature capturing how specific domain terminology changes over time.