Improving term extraction with linguistic analysis in the biomedical domain

This paper presents a linguistic-based approach to term extraction in the biomedical domain. The method is based on a linguistic analysis of constraints on terms and their context, focusing on participles and prepositional complements. The purpose of our approach is to obtain terms that are relevant for knowledge acquisition applications, such as the creation and enrichment of terminologies and ontologies. We report on the evaluations conducted following two complementary strategies, using a reference terminology and a manual validation. They were applied to two corpora of differing genre and domain, namely pharmacology patents and animal physiology scientific articles. Our work shows that the linguistic analysis-based developments significantly improve extraction results. The method is especially efficient when dealing with gerunds and "to" prepositional modifier