Using Word Alignment to Extend Multilingual Medical Terminologies
Louise Deléger, Magnus Merkel, Pierre Zweigenbaum · 2006
Medical terminologies such as those provided in the UMLS are never exhaustive and there is a constant need to enrich them, especially in terms of multilinguality. We present a methodology to acquire new French translations of English medical terms based on word alignment in a parallel corpus — i.e. pairing of corresponding words. We automatically collected a 27.7-million-word parallel, English-French corpus. Based on a first 1.3-million-word extract of this corpus, we detected 3,255 French translations of English MeSH terms, among which 1,956 are new translations.