Signs and Symptoms in the Psychiatric Domain: A Corpus Analysis

In the medical domain, great effort is taken to normalize terminology at an international level. However, corpus analysis indicates that there is still much work to be done. For example, the basic conceptual distinction between sign (an objective change in a patient's condition) and symptom (subjective evidence of disease or condition as perceived by the patient) is something any medical expert is aware of. In texts of the subdomain of Psychiatry, however, the terms sign and symptom seem to be used indistinctly. Their use was analyzed from a multidimensional perspective in an English language medical corpus on the subdomain of Psychiatry. Collocational information was extracted and then classified according to the data obtained. Finally a comparison was made with an English language corpus on Oncology to see if the conclusions drawn can be applied to other medical subdomains or if the boundaries between the terms are even fuzzier in the Psychiatric domain.