About Lexicon

The SPECIALIST LEXICON was first released in 1994 and is designed as a general English lexicon with extensive biomedical terminology. It encodes a broad range of linguistic knowledge, which includes syntactic categorization, variant forms, and specifications of acronyms and abbreviations. The Lexicon is a fundamental resource for biomedical natural language processing (NLP) and played a central role in the development of UMLS Metathesaurus.

The SPECIALIST LEXICON is composed of unit lexical records, which can be represented in text format, XML format, or as Java objects. 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)