Learning Derived Words from Medical Corpora

Abstract. Morphological knowledge (inflection, derivation, compounds) is useful for medical language processing. Some is available for medical English in the UMLS Specialist Lexicon, but not for the French language. Large corpora of medical texts can nowadays be obtained from the Web. We propose here a method, based on the cooccurrence of formally similar words, which takes advantage of such a corpus to learn morphological knowledge for French medical words. The relations obtained before filtering have an average precision of 75.6% after 5,000 word pairs. Detailed examination of the results obtained on a sample of 376 French SNOMED anatomy nouns shows that 91–94% of the proposed derived adjectives are correct, that 36% of the nouns receive a correct adjective, and that this method can add 41% more derived adjectives than SNOMED already specifies. We discuss these results and propose directions for improvement.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: AIME
• Authors: Pierre Zweigenbaum, Natalia Grabar
• Keywords: AIME 2003, Artificial Intelligence, Medical, Morphological Knowledge, UMLS Specialist Lexicon