Overcoming terminology barrier using Web resources for cross-language medical information retrieval.
A number of authoritative medical websites, such as PubMed and MedlinePlus, provide consumers with the most up-to-date health information. However, non-English speakers often encounter not only language barriers (from other languages to English) but also terminology barriers (from laypersons inverted exclamation mark| terms to professional medical terms) when retrieving information from these websites. Our previous work address language barriers by developing a multilingual medical thesaurus, Chinese-English MeSH, while this study presents an approach to overcome terminology barriers based on Web resources. Two techniques were utilized in our approach: monolingual concept mapping using approximate string matching and crosslingual concept mapping using Web resources. The evaluation shows that our approach can significantly improve the performance on MeSH concept mapping and cross-language medical information retrieval.
Lu
Wen-Hsiang
WH
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, ROC.
Lin
Ray Shih-Jui
RS
Chan
Yi-Che
YC
Chen
Kuan-Hsi
KH
D003144:Communication Barriers; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet; D007802:Language; D046650:Medical Subject Headings; D019303:Multilingualism; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014175:Translating; D014825:Vocabulary