Analysis of Context-Dependent Errors in the Medical Domain in Spanish: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

This corpus-based study aimed to investigate the presence of context-dependent linguistic errors in a corpus of clinical reports. The data were taken from a corpus comprising more than 2 million words and made up of clinical reports from emergency medicine, intensive care unit, general surgery, and psychiatry. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out. A language model based on n-grams was developed for the detection of errors, parameters for the selection of cases were defined, and a classification tool was implemented. The findings indicated that emergency medicine was the medical specialty with the highest number of context-dependent errors and that the most frequent type of error was omission of written accent. Furthermore, the analysis revealed the presence of errors of competence due to the incorrect application of the linguistic norm of Spanish, phenomena of phonetic similarity, and composition of words; it is also worth noting that performance errors occurred due to rapid typing on the keyboard. This study constituted the first analysis and creation of a typology of context-dependent errors for the medical domain in Spanish. It contributed to the design of a module based on linguistic knowledge that can be used for the development and improvement of automatic correction systems that, in turn, are used for data processing in medicine.