Maintenance of self-consistency of coding tables by statistical analysis of word co-occurrences

The author presents a method for maintaining the internal consistency of coding tables. The method was tested on a table used for assisting the daily work of indexing clinical cases to International Classification of Diseases. 300 item were tested selected randomly form a corpus of 3082 clinical diagnoses. The method discovered potential consistency problems in 39 cases, out of which 10 were false positive.