A Linguistic Approach for Facilitating the Interpretation of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Symposium Proceedings: An Efficient Method for Real-Time Literature Review

Abstract

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) has for some time been a leader in facilitating the discussion of human factors in health care. We hoped to capture essences of these discussions through reviewing and analyzing the last ten years of health care-related HFES Annual Meetings Proceedings and the last six years of the HFES Health-Care Symposium Proceedings. Because of the large number of papers, we utilized semi-automated means to process the Proceedings abstracts. These semi-automated means included methods in natural language processing (NLP), computational linguistics (CL), and corpus linguistics. We provide example approaches for visualizing linguistic themes within this body of text that may contribute to efforts in prospective risk awareness within health care. We also suggest an initial framework that is amenable for longitudinal, living, and interactive visualizations into this important and growing body of work.