Author ' s response to reviews Title : Creating a medical dictionary using word alignment : The influence of sources and resources Authors :

There was a lot of jargon in the abstract, which made it difficult to understand without reading the entire paper. The conclusion was nice and to the point. The abstract has been slightly rewritten to be easier to understand. Abstract – there were quite a few typos in the abstract, including: “word alignment is depending on” # “word alignment is dependent on”; “This paper report on” # “This paper reports on”; “pairs were manual verified” # “pairs were manually verified”. The manuscript has been updated according to the suggestions. there were quite a few typos in the abstract, including: “word alignment is depending on” # “word alignment is dependent on”; “This paper report on” # “This paper reports on”; “pairs were manual verified” # “pairs were manually verified”. The manuscript has been updated according to the suggestions. The introduction was awkward. A few suggestions: change “with the recall of 0.77” to “with recall of 0.77” and change precision to be parallel. The manuscript has been updated according to the suggestions. Rewrite last part of that paragraph to: “precision of 0.76, but we hypothesized we could exploit the highly repetitive structure in the terms to achieve even better results. ” The manuscript has been updated according to the suggestions. Put comma after phrase in first sentence in Objective: “In automatic word alignment, parallel. ” The manuscript has been updated according to the suggestions. Change “how the use of resources” to “how different resources” The manuscript has been updated according to the suggestions. Change “This is done by altering which resources. ” to “We accomplish this by altering the resources and medical terminology systems we use. ” The manuscript has been updated according to the suggestions. Background – par. 1 change “simply” to “simple”, change “there is” to “there are”, and delete “as translations contain addition of information as well as deletions. ” The manuscript has been updated according to the suggestions. Bottom of page 5 – delete “It is worth pointing out that” The manuscript has been updated according to the suggestions. Top of page 6 – change to “should be applied over all the training material, because inconsistent. ” The manuscript has been updated according to the suggestions. Middle of page 7 – change “candidate pairs for more” to “candidate pairs of more” The manuscript has been updated according to the suggestions. You sometimes use the passive voice, which makes the sentences harder to understand and allows you to leave out details like who did something. Change the passive voice throughout the paper to active voice. A few examples of important places to change is the Manual inspection section on page 7, the experiment setup on page 10, and the dictionary creation section on page 13– who performed the manual inspection, who evaluated the generated list, and who categorized the term-pair candidates? The manuscript has been updated according to use active voice where it is suitable. The use of the terms “complements” on page 8 was confusing to me—I had to think through what the complement was: the rest of the rubrics or the different language. The manuscript has been slightly rewritten and the word “complements” removed. You use the F-measure to measure reliability—are you familiar with the Hripcsak JAMIA paper that shows that the F-measure is equivalent to kappa when the (unknown) number of TN is large? It would be nice to reference this paper. Yes, we are aware of that paper. We find the paper interesting, but we believe that it is unnecessary to refer to and include material from that paper in an already long manuscript. Best regards, Mikael Nyström <mikny@imt.liu. se> Department of Biomedical Engineering, Division of Medical informatics Linköping University S-581 85 Linköping, Sweden 1. Nyström M, Merkel M, Ahrenberg L, Zweigenbaum P, Petersson H, Åhlfeldt H: Creating a medical English-Swedish dictionary using interactive word alignment. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak 2006, 6(35).