Clive Souter

The automation of controlled vocabulary subject indexing of medical journal articles

This article discusses the possibility of the automation of sophisticated subject indexing of medical journal articles. Approaches to subject descriptor assignment in information retrieval research are usually either based upon the manual descriptors in the database or generation of search parameters from the text of the article. The principles of the Medline indexing system are described, followed by a summary of a pilot project, based upon the Amed database. The results suggest that a more extended study, based upon Medline, should encompass various components: Extraction of ‘concept strings’ from titles and abstracts of records, based upon linguistic features characteristic of medical literature. Use of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) for identification of controlled vocabulary descriptors. Coordination of descriptors, utilising features of the Medline indexing system. The emphasis should be on system manipulation of data, based upon input, available resources and specifically designed rules.

Aspects of spoken vocabulary development in the Polytechnic of Wales Corpus of Children’s English

The Polytechnic of Wales Corpus was collected in the late 1970s for the study of syntactic and semantic development of native English-speaking children aged between six and twelve. This paper demonstrates that interesting lexical information can be gleaned from this corpus for EFL instructors and curriculum designers, even though the size of the corpus (61,000 words) makes it too small for dictionary development. The Corpus was organised to permit researchers to observe changes across age groups, and differences between the sexes and between children of different socio-economic backgrounds. Five investigations illustrate:• rate of vocabulary growth with age in this Corpus;• the extent to which vocabulary is sex-specific;• differences between sexes in the use of affirmatives and negatives, and in the use of male and female personal pronouns;• the extent to which vocabulary size is related to socio-economic class;• persistence of errors in applying regular verb endings to irregular verbs.The Corpus does show active vocabulary size increasing with age, at a rate of only around 50 words per year (in the limited activities used to elicit speech from the children). Surprisingly, around half of the words used by each of the sexes are limited to that sex. Boys make more use of positive expressions, whereas girls make greater use of negatives. Both sexes use he far more than she. There is no clear evidence that social class differences influence vocabulary size. Errors caused by applying regular verb endings to irregular verbs seem to diminish in children between ages six and eight, and have disappeared by age ten.Although it is clear that data sparsity influences these results, they are still useful (and thought-provoking) to curriculum developers and coursebook designers in EFL, as well as researchers in sociolinguistics of child language.