Semi-Automated Extension of a Specialized Medical Lexicon for French

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a specialized lexical resource for a specialized domain, namely medicine. First, in order to assess the linguistic phenomena that need to be adressed, we based our observation on a large collection of more than 300'000 terms, organised around conceptual identifiers. Based on these observations, we highlight the specificities that such a lexicon should take into account, namely in terms of inflectional and derivational knowledge. In a first experiment, we show that general resources lack a large part of the words needed to process specialized language. Secondly, we describe an experiment to feed semi-automatically a medical lexicon and populate it with inflectional information. This experiment is based on a semi-automatic methods that tries to acquire inflectional knowledge from frequent endings of words recorded in existing lexicon. Thanks to this, we increased the coverage of the target vocabulary from 14.1% to 25.7%.

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