• Pierre ZWEIGENBAUM (CNRS-LIMSI)
    Traitements automatiques de la terminologie médicale
    (Automatic processing of medical terminology)
    2001, Vol. VI-2, pp. 47-62

    Specialized texts are characterized by a specific terminology. Medicine holds a particular position in this respect, both because of the impressive number of terms involved and of the amount of international effort devoted to build normalized terminologies. These terminologies play a key role in medical information and knowledge processing. A large part of the work performed on medical language processing is therefore centered on these terminologies, either as information targets or as knowledge sources. We present here, through examples drawn from our own work, various aspects of medical terminology processing.


  • Pierre ZWEIGENBAUM, Brigitte GRAU, Anne-Laure LIGOZAT, Isabelle ROBBA, Sophie ROSSET, Xavier TANNIER, Anne VILNAT & Patrice BELLOT (CNRS-LIMSI)
    Apports de la linguistique dans les systèmes de recherche d'informations précises
    (Contributions of linguistics in the search for precise information)
    2008, Vol. XIII-1, pp. 41-62

    Searching for precise answers to questions, also called “question-answering”, is an evolution of information retrieval systems: can it, as its predecessors, rely mostly on numeric methods, using exceedingly little linguistic knowledge? After a presentation of the question-answering task and the issues it raises, we examine to which extent it can be performed with very little linguistic knowledge. We then review the different kinds of linguistic knowledge that researchers have been using in their systems: syntactic and semantic knowledge for sentence analysis, role of “named entity” recognition, taking into account of the textual dimension of documents. A discussion on the respective contributions of linguistic and non-linguistic methods concludes the paper.