title: Acquiring meaning for French medical terminology: contribution of morphosemantics.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: ATILF, Université Nancy 2, CLSH-BP 3397, 54015 Nancy Cédex, France. fiammetta.namer@univ-nancy2.fr
authors.forename: Fiammetta
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Namer
authors.forename: Pierre
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Zweigenbaum
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D005602:France; D038801:International Classification of Diseases; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D012660:Semantics; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled