这个新的MeSH是怎么回事？探索MeSH叙词表中新描述词的语义来源
What is all this new MeSH about? Exploring the semantic provenance of new descriptors in the MeSH thesaurus
摘要：
医学主题词（MeSH）叙词表是一种广泛应用于生物医学知识系统的受控词汇表，特别是用于科学文献的语义索引。随着MeSH层级通过年度版本更新的发展，引入了一些以前不可用的新描述符。本文探讨了这些新的描述符的概念出处。特别是，我们调查这些新的描述符是否已经被旧的描述符所覆盖，以及它们目前与它们的关系是什么。为此，我们提出了一个框架来分类新的描述符的基础上，他们目前的关系，旧的描述符。基于所提出的分类方案，我们量化，分析和提出了不同类型的新的描述符在MeSH在过去的十五年。结果表明，只有大约25%的新MeSH描述符对应于新出现的概念，而其余的描述符先前被一个或多个现有的描述符隐式或显式地覆盖。它们中的大多数都被一个现有的描述符所覆盖，并且它们通常最终成为当前层次结构中的后代，逐渐导致更细粒度的MeSH词汇表。这些见解的动态的词库是有用的，与MeSH注释的科学文章的回顾性研究，但也可以用来告知政策的更新词库在未来。
英文摘要：
The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary widely used in biomedical knowledge systems, particularly for semantic indexing of scientific literature. As the MeSH hierarchy evolves through annual version updates, some new descriptors are introduced that were not previously available. This paper explores the conceptual provenance of these new descriptors. In particular, we investigate whether such new descriptors have been previously covered by older descriptors and what is their current relation to them. To this end, we propose a framework to categorize new descriptors based on their current relation to older descriptors. Based on the proposed classification scheme, we quantify, analyse and present the different types of new descriptors introduced in MeSH during the last fifteen years. The results show that only about 25% of new MeSH descriptors correspond to new emerging concepts, whereas the rest were previously covered by one or more existing descriptors, either implicitly or explicitly. Most of them were covered by a single existing descriptor and they usually end up as descendants of it in the current hierarchy, gradually leading towards a more fine-grained MeSH vocabulary. These insights about the dynamics of the thesaurus are useful for the retrospective study of scientific articles annotated with MeSH, but could also be used to inform the policy of updating the thesaurus in the future.
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