A Web Corpus for eCare: Collection, Lay Annotation and Learning -First Results-
Marina Santini, Arne Jönsson, Mikael Nyström, Marjan Alirezai · Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems · 2017
In this position paper, we put forward two claims: 1) it is possible to design a dynamic and extensible corpus without running the risk of getting into scalability problems; 2) it is possible to devise noise-resistant Language Technology applications without affecting performance.To support our claims, we describe the design, construction and limitations of a very specialized medical web corpus, called eCare_Sv_01, and we present two experiments on lay-specialized text classification.eCare_Sv_01 is a small corpus of web documents written in Swedish.The corpus contains documents about chronic diseases.The sublanguage used in each document has been labelled as "lay" or "specialized" by a lay annotator.The corpus is designed as a flexible text resource, where additional medical documents will be appended over time.Experiments show that the layspecialized labels assigned by the lay annotator are reliably learned by standard classifiers.More specifically, Experiment 1 shows that scalability is not an issue when increasing the size of the datasets to be learned from 156 up to 801 documents.Experiment 2 shows that lay-specialized labels can be learned regardless of the large amount of disturbing factors, such as machine translated documents or low-quality texts, which are numerous in the corpus.