Word Senses of Academic Vocabulary in Medical Texts and Dictionaries

The purpose of this study was twofold.First, we investigated whether academic words tend to show domain-specific meanings (e.g., resident as physicians trained in medicine) in specialized texts.Second, we offered suggestions for specialized dictionaries based on text analysis.We focused on the medical domain and adopted a computational approach to automatically identify academic words that are more likely to show domain-specific senses.Inspired by Yarowsky's (1995) "one sense per collocation" principle, our approach automatically compared word collocates in medical and general-purpose corpora.We applied this approach to nouns on the Academic Vocabulary List and collected 129 candidate words.However, only seven of them were judged to demonstrate medical senses.Although identifying only few technical word senses, our study found numerous specialized usages of multiword terms.We further checked candidate words and multiword terms in a medical dictionary.Consistent with the corpus results, the candidate words listed as dictionary entries mostly showed academic rather than medical meanings.Furthermore, half of the multiword terms identified in this study were not included in the dictionary.Suggestions for specialized dictionaries are offered based on our findings.