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Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics

Research Degree Forum

Contribution of Syntactic Functions to Single Word Term Extraction

Presented by

Ms. ZHANG Xing

PhD candidate, Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong

Date: 12 May 2010, Wednesday
Time: 4:30 - 5:30 pm
Venue: B7603 (7/F, Blue Zone), Academic Building, CityU

Abstract

This paper intends to investigate what contributions syntactic functions can make towards single word term extraction. It examines the probabilistic relations between medical terms and their syntactic functions. By probabilistic relations, it means the relations between term occurrence ratios and different paths of syntactic functions. An Automatic Term Extraction (ATE) system on the basis of such extended syntactic information is built up to find out which paths of syntactic functions are good indicators for terms after training on a large medical corpus drawn from MEDLINE. As a result, the most helpful syntactic paths in identifying terms will be found out. Accordingly, term candidates occurring in these syntactic paths will be assigned higher weights for better probabilistic estimates. One linguistic motivated method, SF-Value, is proposed to weight termhood of term candidates. Results of experiments show that single word terms are extracted dominantly at a fairly good recall besides multiword terms. It can be conculded that syntactic behaviors of single word terms prove to be especially effective in selecting single word terms. All in all, this work studies the actual usage of terms in real texts rather than a static description of their internal structures. It dynamically characterizes patterns of term usage to a much deeper degree. And this information will in turn contribute to practical ATE system.

Speaker