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Published on: February 23, 2019
Analyzing polysemous concepts from a clinical perspective: application to auditing concept categorization in the UMLS
Fleur Mougin1, Olivier Bodenreider, Anita Burgun
1LESIM, INSERM U593, ISPED, University of Bordeaux 2, France.
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
|March 24, 2009
Summary
Polysemy in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) was analyzed using multi-Semantic Group (SG) concepts. Most multi-SG concepts are correctly categorized, reflecting genuine polysemy and aiding UMLS auditing.
Area of Science:
- Biomedical Informatics
- Medical Terminology
- Knowledge Representation
Background:
- Polysemy, where a single term has multiple meanings, is a common challenge in biomedical vocabularies.
- The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) addresses polysemy by either creating separate concepts or grouping them under a single, multiply-categorized concept.
Purpose of the Study:
- To systematically analyze polysemous concepts within the UMLS Metathesaurus.
- To audit the categorization and hierarchical relationships of multiply-categorized concepts for accuracy.
Main Methods:
- Utilized concepts associated with multiple Semantic Groups (SGs) as a proxy for polysemy.
- Extracted and characterized multi-SG (MSG) concepts, clustering them to identify polysemy types.
- Analyzed SG inheritance and conducted manual reviews for auditing purposes.
Main Results:
- Identified 1208 MSG concepts associated with 30 distinct SG pairs.
- Formed 75 semantically homogeneous clusters, with 276 concepts unclustered due to missing hierarchical data.
- Found that 92% of MSG concepts were adequately categorized, indicating limited semantic compatibility issues.
Conclusions:
- The study provides a systematic analysis and manual audit of multi-SG concepts in the UMLS.
- Correctly categorized MSG concepts accurately represent polysemy within the UMLS Metathesaurus.
- Analyzing SG inheritance is a valuable method for auditing UMLS concept categorization.
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