Frame Semantics-based Study of Verbs across Medical Genres Ornella WANDJI TCHAMI a,1 , Marie-Claude L'HOMME b and Natalia GRABAR a a CNRS UMR 8163 STL, Université Lille 3, 59653 Villeneuve d'Ascq, France b OLST, Université de Montréal, C.P. 6128, succ. Centre-ville, Montréal H3C 3J7, Québec, Canada Abstract. The field of medicine gathers actors with different levels of expertise. These actors must interact, although their mutual understanding is not always completely successful. We propose to study corpora (with high and low levels of expertise) in order to observe their specificities. More specifically, we perform a contrastive analysis of verbs, and of the syntactic and semantic features of their participants, based on the Frame Semantics framework and the methodology implemented in FrameNet. In order to achieve this, we use an existing medical terminology to automatically annotate the semantics classes of participants of verbs, which we assume are indicative of semantics roles. Our results indicate that verbs show similar or very close semantics in some contexts, while in other contexts they behave differently. These results are important for studying the understanding of medical information by patients and for improving the communication between patients and medical doctors. Keywords. Medical informatics, Consumer health informatics, Terminologies, Natural Language Processing, Frame Semantics, France Introduction The field of medicine gathers actors with various backgrounds, such as medical doctors, students, pharmacists, managers, biologists, nurses, imaging experts and of course patients. These actors have different levels of expertise ranging from low (typically, the patients) up to high (eg, medical doctors, pharmacists, medical students). Moreover, actors with different levels of expertise interact, while their mutual understanding might not always be completely successful. This specifically applies to patients and medical doctors [1,2]. We propose to perform a contrastive and comparative analysis of written medical corpora in French, which are differentiated according to their levels of expertise. More specifically, we concentrate on the study of selected verbs used in these corpora and aim to characterize their syntactic and semantic features. We assume that verbs are an excellent starting point for modeling the semantics of sentences. The description of verbs is based on the Frame Semantics (FS) framework [3]. The FS framework is increasingly used for the description of lexical units in different languages [4-6]. Until recently, French has been neglected with regard to this framework. Moreover, this framework can be adapted for processing 1 Corresponding Author. e-Health – For Continuity of Care C. Lovis et al. (Eds.) © 2014 European Federation for Medical Informatics and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License. doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-432-9-1075 1075