Acquisition of elementary synonym relations from biological structured terminology

Abstract

Acquisition and enrichment of lexical resources have long been acknowledged as an important research in the area of computational linguistics. Nevertheless, we notice that such resources, particularly in specialised domains, are missing. However, specialised domains, i.e. biomedicine, propose several structured terminologies. In this paper, we propose a high-quality method for exploiting a structured terminology and inferring a specialised elementary synonym lexicon. The method is based on the analysis of syntactic structure of complex terms. We evaluate the approach on the biomedical domain by using the terminological resource Gene Ontology. It provides results with over 93% precision. Comparison with an existing synonym resource (the general-language resource WordNet) shows that there is a very small overlap between the induced lexicon of synonyms and the WordNet synsets. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.