Using Web resources to construct multilingual medical thesaurus for cross-language medical information retrieval

  • Authors:

  • Wen-Hsiang Lu;Ray S. Lin;Yi-Che Chan;Kuan-Hsi Chen

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan;Stanford Medical Informatics, Stanford, CA, United States;Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan;Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan

  • Venue:
  • Decision Support Systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Due to the language barrier, non-English users are unable to retrieve the most updated medical information from the U.S. authoritative medical websites, such as PubMed and MedlinePlus. However, currently, there is no any cross-language medical information retrieval (CLMIR) system that can help Chinese-speaking consumers cross the language barrier in finding useful English medical information. A few CLMIR systems utilize MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) to help overcome the language barrier. Unfortunately, the traditional Chinese version of MeSH is currently unavailable. In this paper, we employ a semi-automatic term translation method to construct a Chinese-English MeSH by exploiting abundant multilingual Web resources, including Web anchor texts and search-result pages. Through this method, we have developed a Chinese-English Mesh Compilation System to assist knowledge engineers in compiling a Chinese-English medical thesaurus with more than 19,000 entries. Furthermore, this thesaurus has been used to develop a prototypical system for cross-language medical information retrieval, MMODE, which can help consumers retrieve top-quality English medical information using Chinese terms.