Closure properties of Bulgarian clinical text

Irina Temnikova, Ivelina Nikolova, William A. Baumgartner Jr., Galia Angelova, Kevin Cohen

Abstract: Sublanguages are specialized genres of language associated with specific domains and document types. When sublanguages can be recognized and adequately characterized, they are useful for a variety of types of natural language processing applications. Although there are sublanguage studies related to languages other than English, all previous work on sublanguage recognition has focused on sublanguages related to general English. This paper tests whether a sublanguage detecting technique developed for English can be applied to another language. Bulgarian clinical documents are an excellent test case, because of a number of unique linguistic properties that affect their lexical and morphological characteristics. Bulgarian clinical documents were studied with respect to their closure properties and were found to fit the sublanguage model and exhibit characteristics like those noted for sublanguages related to English. It was also confirmed that the clinical sublanguage phenomenon is not a coincidental phenomenon of English, but applies to other languages as well. Implications of this fact for natural language processing are proposed.