Semi-Automated Extension of a Specialized Medical Lexicon for French

This paper describes the development of a specialized lexical resource for a specialized domain, namely medicine. Based on the obser-vation of a large collection of terms, we highlight the specificities that such a lexicon should take into account, and we show that general resources lack a large part of the words needed to process specialized language. We describe an experiment to feed semi-automatically a medical lexicon and populate it with inflectional information, which increased its coverage of the target vocabulary from 14.1 % to 25.7%. 1