title: Automatic acquisition of synonyms from French UMLS for enhanced search of EHRs.
abstract: Currently, the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches in order to improve search and exploration of electronic health records (EHRs) within healthcare information systems is not a common practice. One reason for this is the lack of suitable lexical resources: various types of such resources need to be collected or acquired. In this work, we propose a novel method for the acquisition of synonymous resources. This method is language-independent and relies on existence of structured terminologies. It enables to decipher hidden synonymous relations between simple words and terms on the basis of their syntactic analysis and exploitation of their compositionality. Applied to series of synonym terms from the French subset of the UMLS, the method shows 99% precision. The overlap between thus inferred terms and the existing sparse resources of synonyms is very low.
authors.affiliation: Centre de Recherche des Cordeliers Université Paris Descartes, Inserm, U872, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Natalia
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Grabar
authors.forename: Paul-Christophe
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: Varoutas
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rizand
authors.forename: Alain
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Livartowski
authors.forename: Thierry
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hamon
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003625:Data Collection; D004014:Dictionaries as Topic; D005602:France; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D051188:Knowledge Bases; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized; D019303:Multilingualism; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D017432:Unified Medical Language System; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled