title: Fostering Multilinguality in the UMLS: A Computational Approach to Terminology Expansion for Multiple Languages.
abstract: We here report on efforts to computationally support the maintenance and extension of multilingual biomedical terminology resources. Our main idea is to treat term acquisition as a classification problem guided by term alignment in parallel multilingual corpora, using termhood information coming from of a named entity recognition system as a novel feature. We report on experiments for Spanish, French, German and Dutch parts of a multilingual UMLS-derived biomedical terminology. These efforts yielded 19k, 18k, 23k and 12k new terms and synonyms, respectively, from which about half relate to concepts without a previously available term label for these non-English languages. Based on expert assessment of a novel German terminology sample, 80% of the newly acquired terms were judged as reasonable additions to the terminology.
authors.affiliation: Jena University Language & Information Engineering (JULIE) Lab Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: Johannes
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hellrich
authors.affiliation: Jena University Language & Information Engineering (JULIE) Lab Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: Udo
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Hahn
mesh_terms: D019303:Multilingualism; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D017432:Unified Medical Language System