Appling Text-mining to Extracting Technical Terms from Textbooks―Toward Updating the Terminology in the Field of Radiology Technology―

Abstract

Although terminology requires continuous consideration of recorded technical terms, extracting these terms manually is difficult, because the number of recorded terms is constantly increasing. Text-mining acquires information from numerous documents, and is capable of extracting technical terms. The purpose of this study is to extract candidate terms using text-mining toward updating the terminology of Japanese society of radiological technology (JSRT). First, the subjects for this study were textbooks published by the JSRT, and morphological analysis was conducted, which is an analysis to break the books up into meaningful words. Additionally, index terms of textbooks were extracted. Second, we observed overlaps between the JSRT technical terms and the terms obtained from the morphological analysis and the indexes of textbooks and the extracted terms were absent in the JSRT terminology. The overlap was 53.6% (3090/5770 terms). The terms, "imaging technology for magnetic resonance" and "information and system in radiological technology" were missing from the JSRT terminology. From these results, it was estimated that half number of the JSRT technical terms were changing with time. This study demonstrated that text mining showed the differences between old and new technical terms.