title: A method of cross-lingual consumer health information retrieval.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  This paper presents a method of cross-language information retrieval aiming to make medical information available to patients in French and English, regardless of the query language they wish to use.
  
  
  METHODS
  We describe the two MeSH-related terminologies used in this work. We show that the French patient synonyms included in CISMeF can be automatically mapped to the English consumer-oriented health topics used in MEDLINEplus, via the MeSH thesaurus. The links between French and English patient terms thus inferred can subsequently be exploited to automatically translate patient queries.
  
  
  RESULTS
  129 MEDLINEplus topics have been mapped to 142 CISMeF patient synonyms. Contextual links for cross-language retrieval have been added to the patient dedicated French information Gateway CISMeF.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  we have presented an efficient method for cross-lingual patient information retrieval in French and English, which may also be applied to other language pairs, subject to the availability of patient terminologies and of the MeSH thesaurus in these languages.
authors.affiliation: Equipe GCSIS, Laboratoire PSI - INSA & Université de Rouen, France.
authors.forename: Aurélie
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Névéol
authors.forename: Suzanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Pereira
authors.forename: Lina F
authors.initials: LF
authors.lastname: Soualmia
authors.forename: Benoît
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Thirion
authors.forename: Stéfan J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Darmoni
mesh_terms: D005602:France; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D016239:MEDLINE; D008490:Medical Informatics; D019303:Multilingualism