Developing an Arabic Infectious Disease Ontology to Include Non-Standard Terminology

Lama Alsudias, Paul Rayson


Abstract
Building ontologies is a crucial part of the semantic web endeavour. In recent years, research interest has grown rapidly in supporting languages such as Arabic in NLP in general but there has been very little research on medical ontologies for Arabic. We present a new Arabic ontology in the infectious disease domain to support various important applications including the monitoring of infectious disease spread via social media. This ontology meaningfully integrates the scientific vocabularies of infectious diseases with their informal equivalents. We use ontology learning strategies with manual checking to build the ontology. We applied three statistical methods for term extraction from selected Arabic infectious diseases articles: TF-IDF, C-value, and YAKE. We also conducted a study, by consulting around 100 individuals, to discover the informal terms related to infectious diseases in Arabic. In future work, we will automatically extract the relations for infectious disease concepts but for now these are manually created. We report two complementary experiments to evaluate the ontology. First, a quantitative evaluation of the term extraction results and an additional qualitative evaluation by a domain expert.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.596
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
4842–4850
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.596
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lama Alsudias and Paul Rayson. 2020. Developing an Arabic Infectious Disease Ontology to Include Non-Standard Terminology. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4842–4850, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Developing an Arabic Infectious Disease Ontology to Include Non-Standard Terminology (Alsudias & Rayson, LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nodalida-main-page/2020.lrec-1.596.pdf