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Medical Term Extraction in an Arabic Medical Corpus

This paper tests two different strategies for medical term extraction in an Arabic Medical Corpus. The experiments and the corpus are developed within the framework of Multimedica project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and aiming at developing multilingual resources and tools for processing of newswire texts in the Health domain. The first experiment uses a fixed list of medical terms, the second experiment uses a list of Arabic equivalents of very limited list of common Latin prefix and suffix used in medical terms. Results show that using equivalents of Latin suffix and prefix outperforms the fixed list. The paper starts with an introduction, followed by a description of the state-of-art in the field of Arabic Medical Language Resources (LRs). The third section describes the corpus and its characteristics. The fourth and the fifth sections explain the lists used and the results of the experiments carried out on a sub-corpus for evaluation. The last section analyzes the results outlining the conclusions and future work.