Learning Meronyms from Biomedical Text

The part-whole relation is of special importance in biomedicine: structure and process are organised along partitive axes. Anatomy, for example, is rich in part-whole relations. This paper reports preliminary experiments on part-whole extraction from a corpus of anatomy definitions, using a fully automatic iterative algorithm to learn simple lexico-syntactic patterns from multiword terms. The experiments show that meronyms can be extracted using these patterns. A failure analysis points out factors that could contribute to improvements in both precision and recall, including pattern generalisation, pattern pruning, and term matching. The analysis gives insights into the relationship between domain terminology and lexical relations, and into evaluation strategies for relation learning.