Semantic Processing of Personality Description for Depression Patients

The personality description has been considered to be an important part of the electronic medical records (EMRs) for depression in-patients. However, the personality description of a patient is usually provided by a family member of the patient when he or she is admitted to the hospital. Because of non-professional background of those family members, personality descriptions in EMRS have various problems such as non-standard description, confusion between personality and behavior, and others. In this paper, we propose an approach to dealing with non-standard description of personality for depression patients by introducing a semantic relevance measure of personality. Furthermore, we make a mapping of those personality description items into the personality items in the well-known personality model of the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF). We find some interesting observations on the connection between existing personality description in EMRs and the personality items in the 16PF model, and suggest possible improvement of the personality description in EMRs for depression patients.