A Word Pair Dataset for Semantic Similarity and Relatedness in Korean Medical Vocabulary: Reference Development and Validation

BACKGROUND: The fact that medical terms require special expertise and are becoming increasingly complex makes it difficult to employ natural language processing techniques in medical informatics. Several human-validated reference standards for medical terms have been developed to evaluate word embedding models using the semantic similarity and relatedness of medical word pairs. However, there are very few reference standards in non-English languages. In addition, because the existing reference standards were developed a long time ago, there is a need to develop an updated standard to represent recent findings in medical sciences. OBJECTIVE: We propose a new Korean word pair reference set to verify embedding models. METHODS: From January 2010 to December 2020, 518 medical textbooks, 72,844 health information news, and 15,698 medical research articles were collected, and the top 10,000 medical terms were selected to develop medical word pairs. Attending physicians (n=16) participated in the verification of the developed set with 607 word pairs. RESULTS: The proportion of word pairs answered by all participants was 90.8% (551/607) for the similarity task and 86.5% (525/605) for the relatedness task. The similarity and relatedness of the word pair showed a high correlation (ρ=0.70, P<.001). The intraclass correlation coefficients to assess the interrater agreements of the word pair sets were 0.47 on the similarity task and 0.53 on the relatedness task. The final reference standard was 604 word pairs for the similarity task and 599 word pairs for relatedness, excluding word pairs with answers corresponding to outliers and word pairs that were answered by less than 50% of all the respondents. When FastText models were applied to the final reference standard word pair sets, the embedding models learning medical documents had a higher correlation between the calculated cosine similarity scores compared to human-judged similarity and relatedness scores (namu, ρ=0.12 vs with medical text for the similarity task, ρ=0.47; namu, ρ=0.02 vs with medical text for the relatedness task, ρ=0.30). CONCLUSIONS: Korean medical word pair reference standard sets for semantic similarity and relatedness were developed based on medical documents from the past 10 years. It is expected that our word pair reference sets will be actively utilized in the development of medical and multilingual natural language processing technology in the future.