Defining Medical Words : Transposing Morphosemantic Analysis from French to English

MEDINFOInternational audienceMedical language, as many technical languages, is rich with morphologically complex words, many of which take their roots in Greek and Latin—in which case they are called neo-classical compounds . Morphosemantic analysis can help generate definitions of such words. This paper reports work on the adaptation of a morphosemantic analyzer dedicated to French (DériF) to analyze English medical neoclassical com-pounds. It presents the principles of this transposition and its current performance. The analyzer was tested on a set of 1,299 compounds extracted from the WHO-ART terminology. 859 could be decomposed and defined, 675 of which success-fully. An advantage of this process is that complex linguistic analyses designed for French could be successfully trans-ferred to the analysis of English medical neoclassical com-pounds. Moreover, the resulting system can produce more complete analyses of English medical compounds than exist-ing ones, including a hierarchical decomposition and seman-tic gloss of each wor