Automatically Expanding the Synonym Set of SNOMED CT using Wikipedia

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2015:216:619-23.

Abstract

Clinical terminologies and ontologies are often used in natural language processing/understanding tasks as a method for semantically tagging text. One ontology commonly used for this task is SNOMED CT. Natural language is rich and varied: many different combinations of words may be used to express the same idea. It is therefore essential that ontologies and terminologies have a rich set of synonyms. One source of synonyms is Wikipedia. We examine methods for aligning concepts in SNOMED CT with articles in Wikipedia so that newly-found synonyms may be added to SNOMED CT. Our experiments show promising results and provide guidance to researchers who wish to use Wikipedia for similar tasks.

MeSH terms

  • Data Mining / methods
  • Dictionaries as Topic
  • Encyclopedias as Topic*
  • Machine Learning*
  • Natural Language Processing*
  • Semantics*
  • Social Media / classification*
  • Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine*
  • Terminology as Topic