Cross lingual Unified Medical Language System entity linking in online health communities

Abstract

In Hebrew online health communities, participants commonly write medical terms that appear as transliterated forms of a source term in English. Such transliterations introduce high variability in text and challenge text-analytics methods. To reduce their variability, medical terms must be normalized, such as linking them to Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) concepts. We present a method to identify both transliterated and translated Hebrew medical terms and link them with UMLS entities.