Semantic interpretation of medical language-quantitative analysis and qualitative yield

Abstract

We report on results from an empirical analysis of the semantic interpretation of medical free texts. Our approach to semantic interpretation is based on a lean collection of interpretation rules which are triggered by well-defined configurations in dependency graphs in order to compute a conceptual representation of the texts’ contents. We evaluate the accuracy of semantic interpretation for three types of syntactic dependency patterns, viz. genitives, auxiliary and modal verb complexes, and prepositional phrases. Besides quantitative considerations, we focus on the heuristic guidance, as provided by patterns underlying the semantic interpretation of prepositional phrases, for monitoring the quality of the medical domain knowledge base.