Semi-automatic construction of the Chinese-English MeSH using Web-based term translation method.

Due to language barrier, non-English users are unable to retrieve the most updated medical information from the U.S. authoritative medical websites, such as PubMed and MedlinePlus. A few cross-language medical information retrieval (CLMIR) systems have been utilizing MeSH (Medical Subject Heading) with multilingual thesaurus to bridge the gap. Unfortunately, MeSH has yet not been translated into traditional Chinese currently. We proposed a semi-automatic approach to constructing Chinese-English MeSH based on Web-based term translation. The system provides knowledge engineers with candidate terms mining from anchor texts and search-result pages. The result is encouraging. Currently, more than 19,000 Chinese-English MeSH entries have been complied. This thesaurus will be used in Chinese-English CLMIR in the future.