TriMED: A Multilingual Terminological Database

TriMED: A Multilingual Terminological Database F. Vezzani1, G. M. Di Nunzio2, G. Henrot1 1Dept. of Linguistic and Literary Studies, 2Dept. of Information Engineering University of Padua, Italy federica.vezzani@phd.unipd.it, giorgiomaria.dinunzio@unipd.it, genevieve.henrot@unipd.it Abstract Three precise categories of people are confronted with the complexity of medical language: physicians, patients and scientific translators. The purpose of this work is to develop a methodology for the implementation of a terminological tool that contributes to solve problems related to the opacity that characterizes communication in the medical field among its various actors. The main goals are: i) satisfy the peer-to-peer communication, ii) facilitate the comprehension of medical information by patients, and iii) provide a regularly updated resource for scientific translators. We illustrate our methodology and its application through the description of a multilingual terminological-phraseological resource named TriMED. This terminological database will consist of records designed to create a terminological bridge between the various registers (specialist, semi-specialist, non-specialist) as well as across the languages considered. In this initial analysis, we restricted to the field of breast cancer, and the terms to be analyzed will be extracted from a corpus in English, accompanied by all relevant linguistic information and properties, and re-attached to their pragmatic equivalent in Italian and French. Keywords: medical language, terminology, methodologies and tools for LRs construction and annotation 1. Introduction Communication in the healthcare domain is characterized by a rigid and closed nomenclature which in many cases produces an opaque lexicon difficult to understand. Medi- cal language often contains inconsistencies of scientific ter- minology such as semantic ambiguity, incorrect use of suf- fixes, archaism maintaining, redundancy in the formation of compounds, and etymological inconsistencies (Rouleau, 2003). As a result, patients and in general non-experts in medicine are often exposed to medical terms that can be semantically complex and hardly understandable. More- over, despite the substantial amount of health-related in- formation available on Internet, little is known about the quality and accessibility of that information. As a conse- quence, consumers using the Internet may have difficul- ties finding complete and accurate information on health issues. Deficiencies in information could negatively influ- ence consumer decisions if people are relying on the Inter- net to make treatment decisions, including whether to seek care or not.1 Moreover, it is important to state that due to the existence of an international language of communica- tion, that is English, medical vocabulary is full of foreign words that can create problems during the transfer of med- ical knowledge across different languages. In this work, we present a methodology for the implementa- tion of a terminological tool that contributes to solve prob- lems related to the opacity that characterizes communica- tion in the medical field among its various actors. The main goals are: i) satisfy the peer-to-peer communication, ii) fa- cilitate the comprehension of medical information by pa- tients, and iii) provide a regularly updated resource for sci- entific translators. This work aims to provide a multilingual tool, a cross-evaluation study in which the languages con- sidered are English, Italian and French. …

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