Coupling ontology driven semantic representation with multilingual natural language generation for tuning international terminologies.
OBJECTIVE
The importance of clinical communication between providers, consumers and others, as well as the requisite for computer interoperability, strengthens the need for sharing common accepted terminologies. Under the directives of the World Health Organization (WHO), an approach is currently being conducted in Australia to adopt a standardized terminology for medical procedures that is intended to become an international reference.


METHODS
In order to achieve such a standard, a collaborative approach is adopted, in line with the successful experiment conducted for the development of the new French coding system CCAM. Different coding centres are involved in setting up a semantic representation of each term using a formal ontological structure expressed through a logic-based representation language. From this language-independent representation, multilingual natural language generation (NLG) is performed to produce noun phrases in various languages that are further compared for consistency with the original terms.


RESULTS
Outcomes are presented for the assessment of the International Classification of Health Interventions (ICHI) and its translation into Portuguese. The initial results clearly emphasize the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of the proposed method for handling both a different classification and an additional language.


CONCLUSIONS
NLG tools, based on ontology driven semantic representation, facilitate the discovery of ambiguous and inconsistent terms, and, as such, should be promoted for establishing coherent international terminologies.
Rassinoux
Anne-Marie
AM
University Hospitals of Geneva, Service of Medical Informatics, Switzerland. anne-marie.rassinoux@sim.hcuge.ch
Baud
Robert H
RH
Rodrigues
Jean-Marie
JM
Lovis
Christian
C
Geissbühler
Antoine
A
D006801:Humans; D019303:Multilingualism; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D011174:Portugal; D012660:Semantics; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled