Hi Jessica, You have it correct - LVG will add variants that the dictionary lookup will use in an attempt to discover terms not explicitly in the dictionary database - such as the plurals that you saw. However, it does not guarantee "better" results. The lvg module can add variants that are inaccurate and create false positive returns from the dictionary. For instance, lvg thinks that the plural of the medication "dos" (docusate) is "doses" ... so the word "doses" in text may incorrectly be tagged as the drug. Chen Lin gets credit for discovering this specific example.
Sean -----Original Message----- From: Jessica Glover [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, February 15, 2016 3:36 PM To: [email protected] Subject: LVG documentation Hello, I would like to add a brief explanation and an example in the LVG documentation as to why it says in the Component Use Guide that LVG is effectively required for good results in dictionary lookup, but before I do, I'd like to understand it a bit better myself. I have an example sentence that yielded different results when I ran it through CuisOnlyUMLSProcessor with and without LVGAnnotator enabled. "Nasal canals are free of masses or apparent polyps." No LVG: Identified Annotations: "Nasal", "polyps" With LVG: Identified Annotations: "Nasal", "canals", "masses", "polyps" My guess would be that the canonical (in this case, singular) form of these words is in the UMLS dictionary but the word tokens themselves are not. Can I generalize to say that using LVG gives a better chance of getting a dictionary hit for a missed word token by also looking up relevant variants of that token? Thanks, Jessica
