Enriching medical terminologies: an approach based on aligned corpora
Deleger, L.; Merkel, M.; Zweigenbaum, P.
Studies in Health Technology and Informatics 124: 747-752
2006
ISSN/ISBN: 0926-9630 PMID: 17108604 Document Number: 601239
Medical terminologies such as those in the UMLS are never exhaustive and there is a constant need to enrich them, especially in terms of multilinguality. We present a methodology to acquire new French translations of English medical terms based on word alignment in a parallel corpus - i.e. pairing of corresponding words. We automatically collected a 27.7-million-word parallel, English-French corpus. Based on a first 1.3-million-word extract of this corpus, we detected 10,171 candidate French translations of English medical terms from MeSH and SNOMED, among which 3,807 are new translations of English MeSH terms.