B6:    A medical multilingual lexicon for international co-operation

Robert Baud PhD. Vice-Director, Medical Informatics Division, Hôpitaux Universitaires De Genève (Switzerland)

Target level: INTERMEDIATES

Synopsis

Multilingual vocabularies have to be assembled, either from existing vocabularies essentially in English, or from scratch for new languages in the medical domain. A common lexicon, acting as a universal recipient, and providing conceptual bridges between words, is expected to meet such a goal.

Description

Patient medical records are written in national languages and exchange of information may be severely limited between countries. The need to develop multilingual vocabularies is a key factor to overcome in this situation. In addition, developing teams will advocate the creation of an international vocabulary recipient, as common ground acting in favour of future exchanges. So-called "small languages" may never find the resources for developing medical terminologies.

In these circumstances, a European initiative proposes the creation of a framework to host any number of national vocabularies. Such a recipient should have two facets: a language specific facet with words and their lexical parts; a domain specific facet including conceptual information, unique for all languages, and providing bridges between words.

Tools have to be designed for at least two purposes: first, for the lexicon, using web technologies; second, in the form of a basic toolset, for accessing the lexicon, validation and quality improvements, and guiding the implementation of NLP applications.

This tutorial aims at introducing the multilingual lexicon, discussing its structure and related tools, and specifying the required accompanying procedures. Expected participants are scientists interested by medical linguistic and willing to understand the promises of Natural Language Processing in this domain. Everyone being an expert in at least one language could attend this tutorial.

This tutorial will present a panorama of problems linked to a multilingual dictionary and propose a set of solutions. Current ongoing developments will be reviewed. A basic material, under the forms of slides and computer application examples, will be distributed to participants. Anyone, programmer or potential user, should get a common understanding on the needs, constraints and solutions involved with such a project.