RLIST: a representation scheme for the automated comparison of psychopathological scales and syndromes

摘要

Many different instruments for the assessment and diagnosis of psychopathology are used in research and clinical practice. A representation scheme, ‘RLIST’, was developed for examining the relations between the syndromes or syndrome scales of different instruments by means of the computer. This representation scheme allows the descriptive similarity of syndromes to be determined with more precision than by the manual or approximate approaches presented in the literature. The focus of the present study was a detailed discussion of the syntax and semantics of RLIST, using a comparison of DSM and CBCL classified syndromes as an example. Although originally developed to compare these syndromes, RLIST can be used to match syndromes of other instruments as well. RLIST is capable of representing various kinds of syndrome definitions, including syndromes that require all symptoms to be present (monothetic) and syndromes that require only an optional and minimal subset of symptoms to be present (polythetic). In addition to expressing the logical operators AND, OR, and NOT, RLIST is able to express other formulas of propositional logic, namely the exclusive OR, Equivalence, and Implication. Compared with set theory and established representation schemes such as production rules, RLIST has several advantages. For instance, RLIST is highly compact and permits the weighting of symptoms.