Abstract
The extraction of terms and their variants is an important issue in various applications of natural language processing (NLP), such as question answering and information retrieval. This chapter discusses a method to automatically extract medical terms and their variants from a multilingual corpus of parallel translations. As a first step terms are extracted using a pattern-based approach. In order to determine what terms are variants of each other the distributional method used calculates semantic similarity between terms on the basis of translations of these terms in multiple languages. Word alignment techniques were used in combination with phrase extraction techniques from phrase-based machine translation to extract phrases and their translations from a medical parallel corpus. The approach provides a promising strategy for the extraction of term variants using straightforward and fully-automatic techniques. Moreover, the approach is independent of domain and language and can thus be applied to various domains and various languages for which parallel multilingual corpora exist.
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van der Plas, L., Tiedemann, J., Fahmi, I. (2011). Automatic Extraction of Medical Term Variants from Multilingual Parallel Translations. In: van den Bosch, A., Bouma, G. (eds) Interactive Multi-modal Question-Answering. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17525-1_7
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