Defining and relating biomedical terms: Towards a cross-language morphosemantics-based system

This paper addresses the issue of how semantic information can be automatically assigned to compound terms, i.e. both a definition and a set of semantic relations. This is particularly crucial when elaborating multilingual databases and when developing cross-language information retrieval systems. The paper shows how morphosemantics can contribute in the constitution of multilingual lexical networks in biomedical corpora. It presents a system capable of labelling terms with morphologically related words, i.e. providing them with a definition, and grouping them according to synonymy, hyponymy and proximity relations. The approach requires the interaction of three techniques: (1) a language-specific morphosemantic parser, (2) a multilingual table defining basic relations between word roots and (3) a set of language-independent rules to draw up the list of related terms. This approach has been fully implemented for French, on an about 29,000 terms biomedical lexicon, resulting to more than 3000 lexical families. A validation of the results against a manually annotated file by experts of the domain is presented, followed by a discussion of our method.