Diseases: AIDS vs. cancer (NE vs. concept)

[uhermjakob]

While checking for precedents for issue #69 (drug substances: NE vs. concept) I noticed a general annotation inconsistency regarding diseases:

• cancer is always annotated as a regular concept
• AIDS is always annotated as a named entity

The annotation as a regular concept is supported by consensus examples for cancer. The annotation as a named entity is supported by the inclusion of disease in our list of named entity types. (food-dish is a similar suspect NE type.) It appears that this distinction between cancer and diarrhea on one side and AIDS and Alzheimer on the other side is largely based on capitalization, which is not very satisfactory from a semantic perspective.

[nschneid]

AIDS is capitalized only because it is an acronym, whereas Alzheimer's disease is based on a personal name.

Should we treat AIDS and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome both as common concepts, or one or both as named entities? Other jargon terms like ERP or N400 or International Phonetic Alphabet are likewise problematic.

If treating multiword jargon terms as concepts, should they be flat (acquired-immunodeficiency-syndrome) or analyzed ((s / syndrome :mod immunodeficiency :ARG1-of (a / acquire-01)))?

[kevincrawfordknight]

we really want wikify technical terms, just like we're about to wikify names

m

On Aug 21, 2013, at 5:48 PM, nschneid notifications@github.com wrote:

AIDS is capitalized only because it is an acronym, whereas Alzheimer's disease is based on a personal name.

Should we treat AIDS and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome both as common concepts, or one or both as named entities? Other jargon terms like ERP or N400 or International Phonetic Alphabet are likewise problematic.

If treating multiword jargon terms as concepts, should they be flat (acquired-immunodeficiency-syndrome) or analyzed ((s / syndrome :mod immunodeficiency :ARG1-of (a / acquire-01)))?

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