Cross-Language Information Retrieval with the UMLS Metathesaurus
David
Eichmann
Miguel E Ruiz
Padmini Srinivasan
School of Library and Information Science
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242, USA
Abstract
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.
SIGIR'98
24-28 August 1998
Melbourne, Australia.
sigir98@cs.mu.oz.au.