SNOMED CT in a language isolate: an algorithm for a semiautomatic translation

[摘要] BackgroundThe SystematizedNomenclature ofMedicine -ClinicalTerms (SNOMED CT) is officially released in English and Spanish. In the Basque Autonomous Community two languages, Spanish and Basque, are official. The first attempt to semi-automatically translate the SNOMED CT terminology content to Basque, a less resourced language is presented in this paper.MethodsA translation algorithm that has its basis in Natural Language Processing methods has been designed and partially implemented. The algorithm comprises four phases from which the first two have been implemented and quantitatively evaluated.ResultsResults are promising as we obtained the equivalents in Basque of 21.41% of the disorder terms of the English SNOMED CT release. As the methods developed are focused on that hierarchy, the results in other hierarchies are lower (12.57% for body structure descriptions, 8.80% for findings and 3% for procedures).ConclusionsWe are in the way to reach two of our objectives when translating SNOMED CT to Basque: to use our language to access rich multilingual resources and to strengthen the use of the Basque language in the biomedical area.

[发布日期] 2015-06-15

[关键词] SNOMED CT translation;Basque Language Isolate;Natural Language Processing;Finite State Transducers