Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 8, 2025

Multi-Modal Signals for Analyzing Pain Responses to Thermal and Electrical Stimuli
Published on: April 5, 2019
Development of a Lexicon for Pain
Jaya Chaturvedi1, Aurelie Mascio1, Sumithra U Velupillai1
1Department of Biostatistics and Health Informatics, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neurosciences, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
Abstract:
Pain has been an area of growing interest in the past decade and is known to be associated with mental health issues. Due to the ambiguous nature of how pain is described in text, it presents a unique natural language processing (NLP) challenge. Understanding how pain is described in text and utilizing this knowledge to improve NLP tasks would be of substantial clinical importance. Not much work has previously been done in this space. For this reason, and in order to develop an English lexicon for use in NLP applications, an exploration of pain concepts within free text was conducted. The exploratory text sources included two hospital databases, a social media platform (Twitter), and an online community (Reddit). This exploration helped select appropriate sources and inform the construction of a pain lexicon. The terms within the final lexicon were derived from three sources-literature, ontologies, and word embedding models. This lexicon was validated by two clinicians as well as compared to an existing 26-term pain sub-ontology and MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms. The final validated lexicon consists of 382 terms and will be used in downstream NLP tasks by helping select appropriate pain-related documents from electronic health record (EHR) databases, as well as pre-annotating these words to help in development of an NLP application for classification of mentions of pain within the documents. The lexicon and the code used to generate the embedding models have been made publicly available.
Related Concept Videos
Analgesia and Pain Management
Nociception
Pain
Opioid Analgesics: Synthetic and Semisynthetic Opioids
Local Anesthetics: Clinical Application as Epidural Anesthesia
Since epidural anesthetics can be infused through an epidural catheter, all types of drugs, including short-acting ones, can be administered. Chloroprocaine and lidocaine are examples of short and long-duration anesthetics, respectively. Bupivacaine...
Opioid Analgesics: Morphine and Other Natural Cogeners

