Using the Mesh Thesaurus to Index a Medical Article: Combination of Content, Structure and Semantics

This paper proposes an automatic method using a MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) thesaurus for generating a semantic annotation of medical articles. First, our approach uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques to extract the indexing terms. Second, it extracts the Mesh concepts from this set of indexing terms. Then, these concepts are weighed based on their frequencies, locations in the article and their semantic relationships according to MeSH. Next, a refinement phase is triggered in order to upgrade the frequent ontology's concepts and determine the ones which will be integrated in the annotation. Finally, the structured result annotation is built.