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<Paper uid="W02-1403">
  <Title>Lexically-Based Terminology Structuring: Some Inherent Limits</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Terminology structuring has been the subject of much work in the context of terms extracted from corpora: given a set of terms, obtained from an existing resource or extracted from a corpus, identifying hierarchical (or other types of) relations between these terms. The present paper focusses on terminology structuring by lexical methods, which match terms on the basis on their content words, taking morphological variants into account. Experiments are done on a 'flat' list of terms obtained from an originally hierarchically-structured terminology: the French version of the US National Library of Medicine MeSH thesaurus. We compare the lexically-induced relations with the original MeSH relations: after a quantitative evaluation of their congruence through recall and precision metrics, we perform a qualitative, human analysis of the 'new' relations not present in the MeSH. This analysis shows, on the one hand, the limits of the lexical structuring method. On the other hand, it also reveals some specific structuring choices and naming conventions made by the MeSH designers, and emphasizes ontological commitments that cannot be left to automatic structuring.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>