Learning formal definitions for biomedical concepts

Ontologies such as the SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT), and the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) play a major role in life sciences. Modeling formally the concepts and the roles in this domain is a crucial process to allow for the integration of biomedical knowledge across applications. In this direction we propose a novel methodology to learn formal definitions for biomedical concepts from unstructured text. We evaluate experimentally the suggested methodology in learning formal definitions of SNOMED CT concepts, using their text definitions from MeSH. The evaluation is focused on the learning of three roles which are among the most populated roles in SNOMED CT: Associated Morphology, Finding Site and Causative Agent. Results show that our methodology may provide an Accuracy of up to 75%. For the representation of the instances three main approaches are suggested, namely, Bag of Words, word n-grams and character n-grams.