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Word Sense Disambiguation in the Biomedical Domain: Short Literature Review

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International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Development (AI2SD 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 713))

Abstract

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is a subfield of Natural Language Processing that discerns which meaning of a given term is used in a specific context. Exclusively in the biomedical domain, automatic processing of medical documents containing biomolecular entities, diseases, proteins, and genes, for instance, is summoning namely because many of the terminologies are ambiguous. Word Sense Disambiguation algorithms work mainly on identifying the correct sense of a given vague word in its specific context. This paper runs through the existing methods and datasets in WSD in the biomedical domain. Various methods were applied in this endeavour ranging from knowledge based methods to supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods, applied to different types of datasets such as PubMed and PubMed Central, MIMIC III, Medline, etc. The main findings in our study include the following: (i)The lack of large testing datasets containing medical ambiguities available for public use limited the application of WSD in the biomedical domain. (ii)Whilst the unsupervised methods rely mainly on the UMLS Metathesaurus and can be applied widely, the restricted use of a manually annotated dataset containing both ambiguous words and their definitions, along with supervised learning methods, have given promising results in terms of providing the best definition for the given entity. (iii)Automatic analysis of massive health related corpora would be liable to err without accurate word sense disambiguation approaches.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LISAC Laboratory, Faculty of Sciences Dhar EL Mahraz, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Fez, Morocco

    Oumayma El Hannaoui, El Habib Nfaoui & Fatima El Haoussi

Authors
  1. Oumayma El Hannaoui
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  2. El Habib Nfaoui
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  3. Fatima El Haoussi
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Correspondence to Oumayma El Hannaoui .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Polish Academy of Sciences, Systems Research Institute, Warsaw, Poland

    Janusz Kacprzyk

  2. Abdelmalek Essaâdi University, Tangier, Morocco

    Mostafa Ezziyyani

  3. Department of Automatics and Applied Software, Aurel Vlaicu University of Arad, Arad, Romania

    Valentina Emilia Balas

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El Hannaoui, O., Nfaoui, E.H., El Haoussi, F. (2023). Word Sense Disambiguation in the Biomedical Domain: Short Literature Review. In: Kacprzyk, J., Ezziyyani, M., Balas, V.E. (eds) International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Development. AI2SD 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 713. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35248-5_23

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