Medical discourse and subjectivity

Abstract

Actors and users of the medical field (doctors, nurses, patients, medical students, pharmacists, etc.) are neither from the same social and professional category nor they have the same expertise level of the field. Their writings testify about this fact through the terminology used, for instance. Besides, the writings also show difference in the use of subjectivity markers. The automatic study of the subjectivity in the medical discourse in texts written in French is addressed in this paper. We compare the documents written by medical doctors and biomedical researchers (scientific literature, clinical reports) with the patient discourse (discussions from health fora) through a contrastive analysis of differences observed in the use of descriptors like uncertainty and polarity markers, non-lexical (smileys, repeated punctuations, etc.) and lexical emotional markers, and medical terms related to disorders, medications and procedures. We perform automatic annotation and categorization of documents in order to better observe the specificities of the studied medical discourses.