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Hauptverfasser: Dilworth, Jonathon, Yang, Hui, Chen, Jiaoyan, Gao, Yongsheng, Jimenez-Ruiz, Ernesto
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16698
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author Dilworth, Jonathon
Yang, Hui
Chen, Jiaoyan
Gao, Yongsheng
Jimenez-Ruiz, Ernesto
author_facet Dilworth, Jonathon
Yang, Hui
Chen, Jiaoyan
Gao, Yongsheng
Jimenez-Ruiz, Ernesto
contents SNOMED CT is a biomedical ontology with a hierarchical representation, modelling terminological concepts at a large scale. Knowledge retrieval in SNOMED CT is critical for its application but often proves challenging due to linguistic ambiguity, synonymy, polysemy, and so on. This problem is exacerbated when the queries are out-of-vocabulary (OOV), i.e., lacking any equivalent matches in the ontology. In this work, we focus on the problem of hierarchical concept retrieval from SNOMED CT with OOV queries, and propose an approach driven by utilising language model-based ontology embeddings, which represent hierarchical concepts in a hyperbolic space for enabling efficient subsumption inference between a textual query and an arbitrary concept. For evaluation, we construct three datasets where OOV queries are annotated against SNOMED CT concepts, testing the retrieval of the most specific subsumers and their less relevant ancestors. We find that our method outperforms the baselines, including SBERT, SapBERT, and two lexical matching methods. While evaluated against SNOMED CT, the approach is generalisable and can be extended to other ontologies. We release all the experiment codes and datasets at https://github.com/jonathondilworth/HR-OOV-SNOMED-CT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_16698
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hierarchical Retrieval with Out-Of-Vocabulary Queries: A Case Study on SNOMED CT
Dilworth, Jonathon
Yang, Hui
Chen, Jiaoyan
Gao, Yongsheng
Jimenez-Ruiz, Ernesto
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
SNOMED CT is a biomedical ontology with a hierarchical representation, modelling terminological concepts at a large scale. Knowledge retrieval in SNOMED CT is critical for its application but often proves challenging due to linguistic ambiguity, synonymy, polysemy, and so on. This problem is exacerbated when the queries are out-of-vocabulary (OOV), i.e., lacking any equivalent matches in the ontology. In this work, we focus on the problem of hierarchical concept retrieval from SNOMED CT with OOV queries, and propose an approach driven by utilising language model-based ontology embeddings, which represent hierarchical concepts in a hyperbolic space for enabling efficient subsumption inference between a textual query and an arbitrary concept. For evaluation, we construct three datasets where OOV queries are annotated against SNOMED CT concepts, testing the retrieval of the most specific subsumers and their less relevant ancestors. We find that our method outperforms the baselines, including SBERT, SapBERT, and two lexical matching methods. While evaluated against SNOMED CT, the approach is generalisable and can be extended to other ontologies. We release all the experiment codes and datasets at https://github.com/jonathondilworth/HR-OOV-SNOMED-CT.
title Hierarchical Retrieval with Out-Of-Vocabulary Queries: A Case Study on SNOMED CT
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16698