Exploitation of semantic similarity for adaptation of existing terminologies within biomedical area

We present a novel method for adaptation of existing terminologies. Within biomedical domain and when no textual corpora for building terminologies are available, we exploit UMLS metathesaurus which merges over a hundred existing biomedical terminologies and ontologies. We exploit also algorithms for measuring the semantic similarity in order to limit, within UMLS, a semantically homogeneous space. In order to make possible such measure, we transform symbolic and semantic information associated to UMLS relations into numeric values. Evaluation performed by experts indicates that extracted concepts are relevant and their coverage satisfying. Additional semantic filters allow to improve the precision of the obtained terminology.