Synonym set extraction from the biomedical literature by lexical pattern discovery

Background: Although there are a large number of thesauri for the biomedical domain many of them lack coverage in terms and their variant forms. Automatic thesaurus construction based on patterns was first suggested by Hearst [1], but it is still not clear how to automatically construct such patterns for different semantic relations and domains. In particular it is not certain which patterns are useful for capturing synonymy. The assumption of extant resources such as parsers is also a limiting factor for many languages, so it is desirable to find patterns that do not use syntactical analysis. Finally to give a more consistent and applicable result it is desirable to use these patterns to form synonym sets in a sound way. Results: We present a method that automatically generates regular expression patterns by expanding seed patterns in a heuristic search and then develops a feature vector based on the occurrence of term pairs in each developed pattern. This allows for a binary classif...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: John McCrae, Nigel Collier
• Keywords: Automatic Thesaurus Construction, BMCBI 2008, Synonym Sets, Term Pairs