About Lexicon

The SPECIALIST LEXICON was first released in 1994. It is intended to be a general English lexicon that includes many biomedical terms. It contains a range of linguistic knowledge, which includes syntactic categorization, variant forms, and specifications of acronyms and abbreviations. It is the fundamental piece for biomedical natural language processing (NLP) and used in the development of UMLS Metathesaurus.

The SPECIALIST LEXICON consists of unit lexical records. A lexical record can be represented in text format, XML format, and Java object. For example, the record of "medicine" can be represented as:

• Text Format

{base=medicine
entry=E0039272
	cat=noun
	variants=reg
	variants=uncount
}

• XML Format

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<lexRecord>
	<base>medicine</base>
	<eui>E0039272</eui>
	<cat>noun</cat>
	<inflVars cit="medicine" unInfl="medicine" eui="E0039272" cat="noun" infl="base" type="basic">medicine</inflVars>
	<inflVars cit="medicine" unInfl="medicine" eui="E0039272" cat="noun" infl="singular" type="basic">medicine</inflVars>
	<inflVars cit="medicine" unInfl="medicine" eui="E0039272" cat="noun" infl="plural" type="reg">medicines</inflVars>
	<nounEntry>
		<variants>reg</variants>
		<variants>uncount</variants>
	</nounEntry>
</lexRecord>

• Java Object

lexRecord base:string eui:string cat:string inflVars: vector(inflVars) nounEntry: (nounEntry)

inflVars inflVar:string cit:string unInfl:string eui:string noun:string infl:string type:string

nounEntry variants: vector(string)