Semantic Relations of Binary Compounds Annotated with SNOMED CT

The objective of this paper is to investigate whether a meaningful interpretation can be easily assigned to compound medical terms that have been assigned two distinct concepts taken from one of the most comprehensive, clinical healthcare terminologies, the (Swedish) SNOMED CT (R). A binary compound term is a union of two terms to construct a complex term of special meaning that is quickly conveyed by not using separated (multiword) terms but rather solid or closed ones (not separated by space or hyphen). This is a case when the vocabulary lacks a single code for such concept; at the same time, solid compounds is the norm for expressing compounds in Germanic languages, such as Swedish. It is therefore useful and challenging to both identify such compounds and also determine the semantic relation that holds between the compound's constituents. The hypothesis we explore is that, if there are two or more noun compounds in which the head and modifier of each one belong to the same semantic type respectively, then the same relation probably holds in each of them. The juxtaposition of the concepts' membership within the SNOMED CT is used for determining an approximation of the semantic relation between head and modifier.