Translating medical terminologies through word alignment in parallel text corpora

Developing international multilingual terminologies is a time-consuming process. We present a methodology which aims to ease this process by automatically acquiring new translations of medical terms based on word alignment in parallel text corpora, and test it on English and French. After collecting...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of biomedical informatics 2009-08, Vol.42 (4), p.692-701
Main Authors: Deléger, Louise, Merkel, Magnus, Zweigenbaum, Pierre
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computational Biology - methods
Medical Subject Headings
Medical terminology
MedlinePlus
Multilingualism
Multilinguality
Natural Language Processing
Parallel corpora
Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine
TECHNOLOGY
TEKNIKVETENSKAP
Translating
Vocabulary, Controlled
Word alignment
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Summary:Developing international multilingual terminologies is a time-consuming process. We present a methodology which aims to ease this process by automatically acquiring new translations of medical terms based on word alignment in parallel text corpora, and test it on English and French. After collecting a parallel, English–French corpus, we detected French translations of English terms from three terminologies—MeSH, SNOMED CT and the MedlinePlus Health Topics. We obtained respectively for each terminology 74.8%, 77.8% and 76.3% of linguistically correct new translations. A sample of the MeSH translations was submitted to expert review and 61.5% were deemed desirable additions to the French MeSH. In conclusion, we successfully obtained good quality new translations, which underlines the suitability of using alignment in text corpora to help translating terminologies. Our method may be applied to different European languages and provides a methodological framework that may be used with different processing tools.
ISSN:1532-0464
1532-0480
DOI:10.1016/j.jbi.2009.03.002