Incidence Rate of Canonical vs. Derived Medical Terminology in Natural Language

Medical terminology appears in the natural language in multiple forms: canonical, derived or inflected form. This research presents an analysis of the form in which medical terminology appears in Romanian and English language. The sources of medical language used for the study are web pages presenting medical information for patients and other lay users. The results show that, in English, medical terminology tends to appear more in canonical form while, in the case of Romanian, it is the opposite. This paper also presents the service that was created to perform this analysis. This tool is available for the general public, and it is designed to be easily extensible, allowing the addition of other languages.