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Nominalization and Alternations in Biomedical Language

BACKGROUND: This paper presents data on alternations in the argument structure of common domain-specific verbs and their associated verbal nominalizations in the PennBioIE corpus. Alternation is the term in theoretical linguistics for variations in the surface syntactic form of verbs, e.g. the diffe...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Cohen, K. Bretonnel, Palmer, Martha, Hunter, Lawrence
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2008
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2527518/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18779866
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003158
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author Cohen, K. Bretonnel
Palmer, Martha
Hunter, Lawrence
author_facet Cohen, K. Bretonnel
Palmer, Martha
Hunter, Lawrence
author_sort Cohen, K. Bretonnel
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: This paper presents data on alternations in the argument structure of common domain-specific verbs and their associated verbal nominalizations in the PennBioIE corpus. Alternation is the term in theoretical linguistics for variations in the surface syntactic form of verbs, e.g. the different forms of stimulate in FSH stimulates follicular development and follicular development is stimulated by FSH. The data is used to assess the implications of alternations for biomedical text mining systems and to test the fit of the sublanguage model to biomedical texts. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We examined 1,872 tokens of the ten most common domain-specific verbs or their zero-related nouns in the PennBioIE corpus and labelled them for the presence or absence of three alternations. We then annotated the arguments of 746 tokens of the nominalizations related to these verbs and counted alternations related to the presence or absence of arguments and to the syntactic position of non-absent arguments. We found that alternations are quite common both for verbs and for nominalizations. We also found a previously undescribed alternation involving an adjectival present participle. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We found that even in this semantically restricted domain, alternations are quite common, and alternations involving nominalizations are exceptionally diverse. Nonetheless, the sublanguage model applies to biomedical language. We also report on a previously undescribed alternation involving an adjectival present participle.
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spelling pubmed-25275182008-09-09 Nominalization and Alternations in Biomedical Language Cohen, K. Bretonnel Palmer, Martha Hunter, Lawrence PLoS One Research Article BACKGROUND: This paper presents data on alternations in the argument structure of common domain-specific verbs and their associated verbal nominalizations in the PennBioIE corpus. Alternation is the term in theoretical linguistics for variations in the surface syntactic form of verbs, e.g. the different forms of stimulate in FSH stimulates follicular development and follicular development is stimulated by FSH. The data is used to assess the implications of alternations for biomedical text mining systems and to test the fit of the sublanguage model to biomedical texts. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We examined 1,872 tokens of the ten most common domain-specific verbs or their zero-related nouns in the PennBioIE corpus and labelled them for the presence or absence of three alternations. We then annotated the arguments of 746 tokens of the nominalizations related to these verbs and counted alternations related to the presence or absence of arguments and to the syntactic position of non-absent arguments. We found that alternations are quite common both for verbs and for nominalizations. We also found a previously undescribed alternation involving an adjectival present participle. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We found that even in this semantically restricted domain, alternations are quite common, and alternations involving nominalizations are exceptionally diverse. Nonetheless, the sublanguage model applies to biomedical language. We also report on a previously undescribed alternation involving an adjectival present participle. Public Library of Science 2008-09-09 /pmc/articles/PMC2527518/ /pubmed/18779866 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003158 Text en Cohen et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Cohen, K. Bretonnel
Palmer, Martha
Hunter, Lawrence
Nominalization and Alternations in Biomedical Language
title Nominalization and Alternations in Biomedical Language
title_full Nominalization and Alternations in Biomedical Language
title_fullStr Nominalization and Alternations in Biomedical Language
title_full_unstemmed Nominalization and Alternations in Biomedical Language
title_short Nominalization and Alternations in Biomedical Language
title_sort nominalization and alternations in biomedical language
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2527518/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18779866
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003158
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