Information about the chief complaint (CC), also known as the patient's reason for seeking emergency care, is critical for patient prioritization for treatment and determination of patient flow through the emergency department (ED). Triage nurses document the CC at the start of the ED visit, and the data are increasingly available in electronic form. Despite the clinical and operational significance of the CC to the ED, there is no standard CC terminology. We propose the construction of concept-oriented nursing terminologies from the actual language used by experts. We use text analysis to extract CC concepts from triage nurses' natural language entries. Our methodology for building the nursing terminology utilizes natural language processing techniques and the Unified Medical Language System.

EMT-P version 1 is relatively accurate, and cleaning with EMT-P improved the CC-UMLS term match rate over raw data. The authors identified areas for improvement in future EMT-P versions and issues to be resolved in developing a standard CC terminology.

The use of terms from natural and social scientific titles and abstracts is studied from the perspective of sublanguages and their specialized dictionaries. Different notions of sublanguage distinctiveness are explored. Objective methods for separating hard and soft sciences are suggested based on measures of sublanguage use, dictionary characteristics, and sublanguage distinctiveness. Abstracts were automatically classified with a high degree of accuracy by using a formula that considers the degree of uniqueness of terms in each sublanguage. This may prove useful for text filtering or information retrieval systems. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The information-seeking behavior of social science faculty studying the Kurds was assessed using a questionnaire, citation analysis, and follow-up inquiry. Two specific questions were addressed: how these faculty locate relevant government information and what factors influence their seeking behavior and use of such information. Results show that besides using traditional methods for locating relevant government information, social science faculty studying the Kurds use the World Wide Web (Web) and electronic mail (e-mail) for that purpose, suggesting that these faculty are aware of, and utilize, new information technology to support their research. Results also show that the information-seeking behavior of social science faculty studying the Kurds is influenced by factors similar to those influencing other social science faculty. Moreover, results also show that accessing the needed materials is a major information-seeking activity that should be added to David Ellis' behavioral model, and that faculty examined here employ somewhat a more elaborate``differentiating'' information-seeking activity than the one described in the model. Some elements of interdisciplinarity of Kurdish studies as a field of research have been discovered, however, further research is required to verify that. Implications for library services and suggestions for future research are presented. D

Previous research describing Web page and link classification systems resulting from a content analysis of over 75 Web pages left us with four unanswered questions. What is the most useful application of page types: as descriptions of entire pages or as components that are combined to create pages? Is there a kind of analysis that we can perform on isolated anchors, which can be text, icons, or both together, that is equivalent to the syntactic analysis for embedded and labeled anchors? How explicitly are readers informed about what can be found by traversing a link, especially for the relatively broad categories of expansion and resource links? Is there a relationship between the type of link and whether its target is a whole page or a fragment, or if its target is in the same site or a different site than its source? This article examines these questions under the assumption that the author and the reader of Web pages will cooperate in order to have successful communication. Our discussion leads to ideas of how author‐provided context and readers' expectations and experience are combining to form new stylistic conventions and genres on the Web.