Collection and Classification of Japanese Medical Terms

Abstract

The authors have been researching Japanese medical terms and developing teaching materials around those terms in order to effectively support international students who study medicine in Japan and ultimately aim to pass the National Medical Practitioners Qualifying Examination. Since there is a diverse range of vocabulary in medical texts, it is essential to collect medical terms comprehensively and classify them in a systematic manner, in order to help students learn medical terms effectively. In this study, a medical book corpus was constructed from the texts of medical books. The texts were classified into 27 types of medical departments, and the words contained therein were collected and classified, as a preparatory step to create systematic word lists for medicine. Then, high-frequency particles, affixes, verbs, and domain-specific nouns were analyzed to clarify the unique features of medical texts. It was found that there are some unique affixes and verbs in medical texts. Also, compiling word lists for each medical department seems to be useful, as each different medical department has many different domain- specific nouns.