Towards Automatic Distinction between Specialized and Non-Specialized Occurrences of Verbs in Medical Corpora

The medical field gathers people of different social statuses, such as students, pharmacists, managers, biologists, nurses and mainly medical doctors and patients, who represent the main actors. Despite their different levels of expertise, these actors need to interact and understand each other but the communication is not always easy and effective. This paper describes a method for a contrastive automatic analysis of verbs in medical corpora, based on the semantic annotation of the verbs nominal co-occurents. The corpora used are specialized in cardiology and distinguished according to their levels of expertise (high and low). The semantic annotation of these corpora is performed by using an existing medical terminology. The results indicate that the same verbs occurring in the two corpora show different specialization levels, which are indicated by the words (nouns and adjectives derived from medical terms) they occur with.