SAPHIRE International: a tool for cross-language information retrieval.

The world's foremost medical literature is written in English, yet much of the world does not speak English as a primary language. This has led to increasing research interest in cross-language information retrieval, where textual databases are queried in languages other than the one in which they are written. We describe enhancements to the SAPHIRE concept-retrieval system, which maps free-text documents and queries to concepts in the UMLS Metathesaurus, that allow it to accept text input and provide Metathesaurus concept output in any of six languages: English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese. An example of the use of SAPHIRE International is shown in the CliniWeb catalogue of clinically-oriented Web pages. A formative evaluation of German terms shows that additional work is required in handling plural and other suffix variants as well as expanding the breadth of synonyms in the UMLS Metathesaurus.