Cross-lingual semantic annotation of biomedical literature: experiments in Spanish and English

Authors: Naiara Perez Miguel Pablo Accuosto Àlex Bravo Montserrat Cuadros Oller Eva Martínez Horacio Saggion German Rigau

Date: 15.03.2020

Bioinformatics


Abstract

Biomedical literature is one of the most relevant sources of information for knowledge mining in the field of Bioinformatics. In spite of English being the most widely addressed language in the field; in recent years, there has been a growing interest from the natural language processing community in dealing with languages other than English. However, the availability of language resources and tools for appropriate treatment of non-English texts is lacking behind. Our research is concerned with the semantic annotation of biomedical texts in the Spanish language, which can be considered an under-resourced language where biomedical text processing is concerned.We have carried out experiments to assess the effectiveness of several methods for the automatic annotation of biomedical texts in Spanish. One approach is based on the linguistic analysis of Spanish texts and their annotation using an information retrieval and concept disambiguation approach. A second method takes advantage of a Spanish–English machine translation process to annotate English documents and transfer annotations back to Spanish. A third method takes advantage of the combination of both procedures. Our evaluation shows that a combined system has competitive advantages over the two individual procedures.UMLSmapper (https://snlt.vicomtech.org/umlsmapper) and the annotation transfer tool (http://scientmin.taln.upf.edu/anntransfer/) are freely available for research purposes as web services and/or demos.Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

BIB_text

@Article {
title = {Cross-lingual semantic annotation of biomedical literature: experiments in Spanish and English},
journal = {Bioinformatics},
pages = {1872-1880},
volume = {36},
keywds = {
semantic annotation, UMLS, EHR
}
abstract = {

Biomedical literature is one of the most relevant sources of information for knowledge mining in the field of Bioinformatics. In spite of English being the most widely addressed language in the field; in recent years, there has been a growing interest from the natural language processing community in dealing with languages other than English. However, the availability of language resources and tools for appropriate treatment of non-English texts is lacking behind. Our research is concerned with the semantic annotation of biomedical texts in the Spanish language, which can be considered an under-resourced language where biomedical text processing is concerned.We have carried out experiments to assess the effectiveness of several methods for the automatic annotation of biomedical texts in Spanish. One approach is based on the linguistic analysis of Spanish texts and their annotation using an information retrieval and concept disambiguation approach. A second method takes advantage of a Spanish–English machine translation process to annotate English documents and transfer annotations back to Spanish. A third method takes advantage of the combination of both procedures. Our evaluation shows that a combined system has competitive advantages over the two individual procedures.UMLSmapper (https://snlt.vicomtech.org/umlsmapper) and the annotation transfer tool (http://scientmin.taln.upf.edu/anntransfer/) are freely available for research purposes as web services and/or demos.Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


}
doi = {10.1093/bioinformatics/btz853},
date = {2020-03-15},
}
Vicomtech

Parque Científico y Tecnológico de Gipuzkoa,
Paseo Mikeletegi 57,
20009 Donostia / San Sebastián (Spain)

+(34) 943 309 230

Zorrotzaurreko Erribera 2, Deusto,
48014 Bilbao (Spain)

close overlay

Behavioral advertising cookies are necessary to load this content

Accept behavioral advertising cookies