title: Aligning lay and specialized passages in comparable medical corpora.
abstract: While the public has increasingly access to medical information, specialized medical language is often difficult for non-experts to understand and there is a need to bridge the gap between specialized language and lay language. As a first step towards this end, we describe here a method to build a comparable corpus of expert and non-expert medical French documents and to identify similar text segments of lay and specialized language. Among the top 400 pairs of text segments retrieved with this method, 59% were actually similar and 37% were deemed exploitable for further processing. This is encouraging evidence for the target task of finding equivalent expressions between these two varieties of language.
authors.affiliation: INSERM UMRS 872 Eq. 20, Paris, France. louise.deleger@spim.jussieu.fr
authors.forename: Louise
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Deleger
authors.forename: Pierre
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Zweigenbaum
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D005602:France; D006266:Health Education; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D012984:Software; D014175:Translating; D017432:Unified Medical Language System; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled