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Fiammetta Namer

Publications and source records attributed to Fiammetta Namer.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

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.

France↗

UMLF: a unified medical lexicon for French.

Medical Informatics has a constant need for basic medical language processing tasks, e.g. for coding into controlled vocabularies, free text indexing and information retrieval. Most of these tasks involve term matching and rely on lexical resources: lists of words with attached information, including inflected forms and derived words, etc. Such resources are publicly available for the English language with the UMLS Specialist Lexicon, but not in other languages. For the French language, several teams have worked on the subject and built local lexical resources. The goal of the present work is to pool and unify these resources and to add extensively to them by exploiting medical terminologies and corpora, resulting in a unified medical lexicon for French (UMLF). This paper exposes the issues raised by such an objective, describes the methods on which the project relies and illustrates them with experimental results.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

Predicting Lexical Relations between Biomedical Terms: towards a Multilingual 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 issue is particularly crucial when elaborating multilingual databases and when developing cross-language information retrieval systems. The paper shows how morpho-semantics 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 la morphosemantic parser, (2) a multilingual table defining basic relations between word roots, and (3) a set of language-independant 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 3,000 lexical families.

Language↗

Acquiring meaning for French medical terminology: contribution of morphosemantics.

Morphologically complex words, and particularly neoclassical compounds, form more than 60% of the neologisms in the biomedical field. Guessing their definitions and grouping them into semantic classes by means of lexical relations are thus two crucial improvements for handling these words, e.g., for information retrieval, indexing and text understanding applications. This paper describes a morphosemantic linguistic-based parser called DériF, currently developed in the framework of two projects, UMLF and VUMeF, and its application to French biomedical derived and compound words. It shows how the resulting morphologically tagged lexicon is enriched by semantic relations leading both to the synthesis of pseudo-definitions and to the constitution of classes of synonyms, hypo- and hypernyms.

Algorithms↗

Towards a unified medical lexicon for French.

Medical Informatics has a constant need for basic Medical Language Processing tasks, e.g., for coding into controlled vocabularies, free text indexing and information retrieval. Most of these tasks involve term matching and rely on lexical resources: lists of words with attached information, including inflected forms and derived words, etc. Such resources are publicly available for the English language with the UMLS Specialist Lexicon, but not in other languages. For the French language, several teams have worked on the subject and built local lexical resources. The goal of the present work is to pool and unify these resources and to add extensively to them by exploiting medical terminologies and corpora, resulting in a unified medical lexicon for French (UMLF). This paper exposes the issues raised by such an objective, describes the methods on which the project relies and illustrates them with experimental results.

Algorithms↗

UMLF: a Unified Medical Lexicon for French.

Lexical resources for medical language, such as lists of words with inflectional and derivational information, are publicly available for the English lantuate with the UMLS Specialist Lexicon. The goal of the UMLF project is to pool and unify existing resources and to add extensively to them by exploiting medical terminologies and corpora, resulting in a Unified Medical Lexicon for French. We present here the current status of the project.

France↗