Query expansion for UMLS metathesaurus disambiguation based on automatic corpus extraction

Abstract

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is an intermediate task within information retrieval and information extraction, which attempts selecting the proper sense of ambiguous terms. In the biomedical domain, general WSD has not received much attention compared to the disambiguation of specific categories of entities like proteins and genes or diseases. Statistical learning approaches have achieved better performance compared to other methods. On the other hand, manually annotated data is limited, and covering all the ambiguous cases of a large resource like the UMLS is infeasible. Knowledge-based approaches using the UMLS and MEDLINE citations have achieved good performance but below that of statis..