A surgeon can operate or approach a complicated integral calculus instead of a renal one: Implications for conceptual and lexical semantic disambiguation

This paper approaches lexical semantic disambiguation and polysemy in the context of medical language understanding. These issues have been addressed as linguistic and cognitive requirements to build a knowledge extraction tool that turns natural language input into conceptual graphs. Previous results obtained with semantic analysis of medical terms in the domain of transplantation and organ failure prompt us to check the capabilities of our prototype to deal with ambiguities and polysemy. Starting from linguistic observation, we attempt to demonstrate how the respect of ambiguities when the co-text is not sufficient for disambiguation implies to introduce a void type in the concept type lattice. Then we show how the "creative use of words" (i.e. new senses in novel context) imposes to dynamically allocate type, categories and roles with the co-text.