The distinction between linguistic and conceptual semantics in medical terminology and its implications for NLP-based knowledge acquisition

Natural language understanding systems have to exploit various kinds of knowledge to be able to represent the meaning behind texts. Getting this knowledge in place is often such a huge enterprise that it is tempting to look for systems that can discover such knowledge automatically. In this paper, we describe how the distinction between conceptual and linguistic semantics probably can assist in reaching this objective, provided that distinguishing between them is not done to rigorously. We present several toy examples to support this view and argue that in a multilingual environment linguistic ontologies should be designed as interfaces between domain conceptualisations and linguistic knowledge bases