Using Domain-Specific Verbs for Term Classification

In this paper we present an approach to term classification based on verb complementation patterns. The complementation patterns have been automatically learnt by combining information found in a corpus and an ontology, both belonging to the biomedical domain. The learning process is unsupervised and has been implemented as an iterative reasoning procedure based on a partial order relation induced by the domain-specific ontology. First, term recognition was performed by both looking up the dictionary of terms listed in the ontology and applying the C/NC-value method. Subsequently, domain-specific verbs were automatically identified in the corpus. Finally, the classes of terms typically selected as arguments for the considered verbs were induced from the corpus and the ontology. This information was used to classify newly recognised terms. The precision of the classification method reached 64%.