Preliminary Considerations on a Systematic Approach to Semic Analysis: The Case Study of Medical Terminology

Abstract

Semic analysis is a linguistic technique aimed at capturing the essential specificities of terms meaning through the identification of minimum semantic units. This procedure is functional for the achievement of an in-depth comprehension of technical terminology and the acquisition of a specialised conceptual knowledge. In this paper, we focus on semic analysis applied to medical terminology. In particular, we discuss some preliminary considerations in order to establish the starting points for a systematic approach to semic analysis. Firstly, we propose a preliminary experiment to 1) study users’ perception of semic analysis and 2) validate the absence of systematicity in its performance. On the basis of the resulting data, we secondly propose a methodology aiming at increasing the systematic factorisation of semic analysis. Finally, we propose an experimental study in order to investigate on the potential interrelation in terms of applicability and productivity of Word Embeddings with respect to semic analysis in the framework of the proposed methodological criteria.