Empirical data for the semantic interpretation of prepositional phrases in medical documents.

We report on the results from an empirical study deal-ing with the semantic interpretation of prepositional phrases in medical free texts. We use a small number of semantic interpretation schemata only, which operate on well-defined configurations in dependency graphs. We provide a quantitative analysis of the performance of the semantic interpreter in terms of recall/precision data, and consider, in qualitative terms, the impact semantic interpretation patterns have on the construction of the underlying medical ontology.