Approach to the Creation of a Multilingual, Medical Interface Terminology

Joseph Roumier (1, 2) , Robert Vander Stichele (3) , Laurent Romary (4, 5) , Elena Cardillo (6)

1 CETIC asbl - Centre d’Excellence en Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication
2 Heymans Institute of Pharmacology
3 Heymans Institute of Pharmacology
4 IDSL - Institut für Deutsche Sprache und Linguistik
5 Inria Saclay - Ile de France
6 e-Health

Health care professionals experience difficulties in the correct medical registration of clinical work and in the efficient searching for answers to clinical questions. These difficulties arise often from a deficient interface between human and machine language. Terminological solutions are often naive attempts to standardize language and terms, with conceptual systems, which may overwhelm the users by their complexity, or be too restrictive to represent crucial details. Moreover, local, professional and cultural differences in vernacular expression are often not represented. We must take into account vocabulary differences between Specialists and General Practitioners talk-ing about the same medical fact. There are even more differences between the languages of patients and physicians. Also, the vocabulary being used evolves over time and space and many local expres-sions exist to designate the same diseases or body parts.

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Joseph Roumier, Robert Vander Stichele, Laurent Romary, Elena Cardillo. Approach to the Creation of a Multilingual, Medical Interface Terminology. Workshop Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Terminology and Artificial Intelligence, Nov 2011, Paris, France. pp.13-15. ⟨hal-00646223⟩