A semantically annotated verbal autopsy corpus for automatic analysis of cause of death

An annotated corpus is essential to the development and evaluation of automatic approaches in corpus linguistics research. The biomedical domain is one area that is witnessing a high growth of corpus based approaches to the development of automatic systems. This paper presents a method employed in building a semantically annotated corpus of 11,741 Verbal Autopsy documents based on verbal records of deaths of mothers, stillbirths, and infants up to 1 year of age, captured for analysis in Ghana between December 2000 and July 2010. An evaluation is carried out based on established criteria to demonstrate that the Verbal Autopsy corpus possesses the qualities of many referenced corpora. The experiences drawn from the methods employed, with alternative approaches, may lead to a more efficient and cost effective corpus development framework.