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Abstract
This exploratory research aims to develop, validate, and implement a semantic ontology in Spanish for the detection of anxiety symptoms in written narratives by young Colombians aged 18 to 30. 430 young people responded to a questionnaire on sociodemographic data, six open-ended questions, and the DASS-21 scale, in an online form. A mixed methods design was used, implementing a text analysis study using natural language processing, a semantic ontology of anxiety symptomatology, and agile software development methodology. The procedure included six phases: 1) development and validation of open-ended questions on anxiety symptomatology to collect information from narrative texts, 2) data collection, 3) ontology construction, 4) ontology validation through interjudge analysis, 5) software development and application, and 6) Efficacy of software for automatic symptom identification. The software developed in this project proved to be effective in its intended task of accurately identifying symptoms in both clinical and non-clinical participants, with more than 80% agreement with clinical experts. The results showed that the majority of symptoms had higher percentages in clinical participants compared to non-clinical participants.
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