The distinction between linguistic and conceptual semantics in medical terminology and its implication for NLP-based knowledge acquisition

Natural language understanding systems have to exploit various kinds of kno wledge in order to represent the meaning behind texts. Getting this knowled ge in place is often such a huge enterprise that it is tempting to look for systems that can discover such knowledge automatically. We describe how th e distinction between conceptual and linguistic semantics may assist in rea ching this objective, provided that distinguishing between them is not done too rigorously. We present several examples to support this view and argue that in a multilingual environment, linguistic ontologies should be design ed as interfaces between domain conceptualizations and linguistic knowledge bases.