Experiments on term extraction using noun phrase subclassifications

In this paper we describe and compare three approaches for the automatic extraction of medical terms using noun phrases (NPs) previously recognized on medical text corpus in Spanish. In the first approach, as baseline, we extracted all NPs, while for the second and third ones the extraction process is directed to "specific NPs" that are determined on the basis of the syntactic and positional criteria, among others. As contributions (i) we showed that it is possible to extract medical terms using "specific NPs", (ii) new terms were added in the software dictionary, and (iii) terms that were not in the reference lists were extracted. For the third contribution, we used the SNOMED CTR terms lists, aiming at improving the IULA reference lists.