In the development of a spanish metamap

Abstract

MetaMap is an online application that allows mapping text to UMLS Metathesaurus concepts, which is very useful interoperability among different languages and systems within the biomedical domain. MetaMap Transfer (MMTx) is a Java program that makes MetaMap available to biomedical researchers. Currently there is no Spanish version of MetaMap, which difficults the use of UMLS Metathesaurus to extract concepts from Spanish biomedical texts. Our ongoing research is mainly focused on using biomedical concepts for cross-lingual text classification and retrieval. In this context the use of concepts instead of bag of words representation allows us to face text classification tasks abstracting from the language. In this paper we evaluate the possibility of combining automatic translation techniques with the use of biomedical ontologies to produce an English text that can be processed by MMTx.