This paper demonstrates a method for determining the syntactic structure of medical terms. We use a model-fitting method based on the Log Likelihood Ratio to classify three-word medical terms as right or left-branching. We validate this method by computing the agreement between the classification produced by the method and manually annotated classifications. The results show an agreement of 75% - 83%. This method may be used effectively to enable a wide range of applications that depend on the semantic interpretation of medical terms including automatic mapping of terms to standardized vocabularies and induction of terminologies from unstructured medical text.

Medical term, terminology, experience

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