From Witch’s Shot to Music Making Bones – Resources for Medical Laymen to Technical Language and Vice Versa
Table 8: Manual Evaluation of 300 selected examples to explore if the term ranked as easiest term is in fact easier than the term ranked as most technical. Considering only pairs with a larger edit distance, the results show that precision increases for both is-easier (checking whether the term is in fact simplified) or is-easier-or-equal (checking whether the term is at least not more complicated).
['distance (>=)', '0', '5', '10', '15', '20', '25', '30', '35', '40', '45', '50']
This does not look very promising at first. However we can make the following analyses: First considering all synonym pairs, in 88% of the cases the expression with the highest harmonic distance is easier or at least similarly technical as the expression with the lowest score. Moreover the table shows that the absolute distance between both scores has a strong influence on the outcome. Increasing the absolute distance between both scores quickly increases also the accuracy (%). In case of examining whether the expression with the higher score is in fact less technical, we can see a constant increase from 50%, using all pairs, to 75% considering a minimum absolute distance of 30. Increasing the distance, decreases obviously the number of synonym pairs. However, after reaching a maximum of 75%, the scores drop slightly, but never undergo 70. A similar effect can be observed for is-easier-or-equal. After a maximum of 93% with a distance of 30, the values slightly decrease but remain always above 88.