Cross-language information retrieval with the UMLS metathesaurus

We investigate an automatic method for Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) that utilizes the multilingual UMLS Metathesaurus to translate Spanish and French natural language queries into English. Two experiments are presented using OHSUMED, a subset of MEDLINE. Both experiments examine retrieval effectiveness of the translated queries. However, in the second experiment, the query translation procedure is augmented with digram based vocabulary normalization procedures. In this comparative study of retrieval effectiveness the measures used are: 11-point-average precision score (11-AvgP); average interpolated precision at recall of 0.1; and noninterpolated (i.e., exact) precision after 10 retrieved documents. Our results indicate that for Spanish the UMLS Metathesaurus based CLIR method appears equivalent to multilingual dictionary based approaches investigated in the current literature French yields less favorable results and our analysis suggests that linguistic differences may have caused the performance differences.

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