Lexical Parameters, Based on Corpus Analysis of English and Swedish Cancer Data, of Relevance for NLG

This paper reports on a corpus-based, contrastive study of the Swedish and English medical language in the cancer sub-domain. It is focused on the examination of a number of linguistic parameters differentiating two types of cancer-related textual material, one intended for medical experts and one for laymen. Language-dependent and language independent characteristics of the textual data between the two languages and the two registers are examined and compared. The aim of the work is to gain insights into the differences between lay and expert texts in order to support natural language generation (NLG) systems.