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A Hybrid Approach to Compiling Bilingual Dictionaries of Medical Terms from Parallel Corpora

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Book cover Statistical Language and Speech Processing (SLSP 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8791))

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Abstract

Existing bilingual dictionaries of technical terms suffer from limited coverage and are only available for a small number of language pairs. In response to these problems, we present a method for automatically constructing and updating bilingual dictionaries of medical terms by exploiting parallel corpora. We focus on the extraction of multi-word terms, which constitute a challenging problem for term alignment algorithms. We apply our method to two low resourced language pairs, namely English-Greek and English-Romanian, for which such resources did not previously exist in the medical domain. Our approach combines two term alignment models to improve the accuracy of the extracted medical term translations. Evaluation results show that the precision of our method is \(86\,\%\) and \(81\,\%\) for English-Greek and English-Romanian respectively, considering only the highest ranked candidate translation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    nlm.nih.gov/research/umls

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007–2013) [grant number 318736 (OSSMETER)].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The National Centre for Text Mining, The University of Manchester, 131 Princess Street, Manchester, M1 7DN, UK

    Georgios Kontonatsios, Claudiu Mihăilă, Ioannis Korkontzelos, Paul Thompson & Sophia Ananiadou

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  1. Georgios Kontonatsios
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  2. Claudiu Mihăilă
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  3. Ioannis Korkontzelos
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  4. Paul Thompson
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  5. Sophia Ananiadou
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Correspondence to Georgios Kontonatsios .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France

    Laurent Besacier

  2. Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain

    Adrian-Horia Dediu

  3. Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain

    Carlos Martín-Vide

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Kontonatsios, G., Mihăilă, C., Korkontzelos, I., Thompson, P., Ananiadou, S. (2014). A Hybrid Approach to Compiling Bilingual Dictionaries of Medical Terms from Parallel Corpora. In: Besacier, L., Dediu, AH., Martín-Vide, C. (eds) Statistical Language and Speech Processing. SLSP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8791. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11397-5_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11397-5_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-11397-5

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