Procedures for mapping vocabularies from non-professional discourse a case study: "Consumer medical vocabulary"

Non-professionals are often unable to access or comprehend information in specialized domains because of technical terminology. Understanding domain-specific vocabulary commonly used by laypersons will help bridge this gap. This paper describes in detail a methodology for collecting and extracting linguistic forms from documents authored by healthcare consumers. The forms were mapped to concepts and the resulting terms were analyzed. Although the case study uses examples from a "consumer medical vocabulary," the procedures are applicable to investigating non-professional vocabularies in other domains.