Morphosemantic Analysis of Compound Word Forms Denoting Surgical Procedures

Abstract

This paper describes a methodology for automated morphosemantic segmentation and semantic interpretation (paraphrasing rules) of medical compound word forms derived from Greek and Latin and denoting surgical procedures. Possible applications of such a procedure in medicine include the construction of computer-based medical dictionaries, automated processing of medical language, facilitation of international communication through national medical language, and vocabulary training for medical and paramedical personnel.

Natural Language Processing in Medicine: An Overview

“…[138,139]. The underlying syntactic-semantic composition rules are described so that automated meaning analysis and paraphrasis can be done [140,141]. This is useful for dictionary building and textindexing.…”

“…More research on morphosemantic analysis of medical vocabulary and the medical language in general (knowledge modelling, medical dictionaries) is performed but without building a "real" system. The focus seems to be principally on the theoretical level [34,[152][153][154] in the style of Norton, Pacak and Dunham [140] and Wingert [145] (cf. supra).…”

MorphoSaurus

“…Metathesaurus for semantic indexing [24]. Follow-up studiesbyPacak andNorton [25,26] not onlydetermine apreferred normalizedf ormf or severalm orphologicalv ariants butr atherc omputep araphrase and other sortsofs emantic (e.g., locative, causative) relations.These relations arei mplicitlyd enoted by complexn ominalc ompounds (also common in Englishm edical jargon [4]) andc an be made explicitb y breaking compounds up into their constituent (morpho-semantic) parts. Pacak et al, however, arenot at allconcernedwith interlingualaspects of thesemorphologicalunits andtheir organization in semantic equivalence classes.A nother limitation of their work is due to restricting the decomposition of compounds to those denoting inflammatoryprocesses (indicated by the '-itis'ending) or to surgical procedures(as indicated, e.g., by the '-ectomy 'or' -plasty'ending).…”

Alternative Ways for Knowledge Collection, Indexing and Robust Language Retrieval

“…These basic operations are the foundation for morpho-semantic decomposition of words. Multiple groups since the sixties have worked in this direction [16][17][18][19][20], and not all of them have reported substantial benefits. The reason is that word decomposition shifts the solution from a lexical approach to a more conceptual approach, and people were perhaps not ready for such a move.…”