A Flexible Rule-Based Approach to Learn Medical English-Chinese OOV Term Translations from the Web

Out-of-vocabulary (OOV) terms, which do not exist in most dictionaries, usually cause failures in a cross language information retrieval (CLIR) system. Most existing approaches achieve a high performance when using web-mining to translate name entity type OOV terms. However, these methods gain a low performance when they are applied to medical OOV terms because they contain non-Chinese characters which are normally ignored by existing approaches, such as symbols, Roman alphabets and Arabic numbers. This paper presents a flexible rule-based approach towards the acquisition of medical OOV term translation. Our method uses a combination of a novel rule-based pattern extraction and brute force generation to identify the part of non-Chinese characters. To cope with the time-consuming task of ranking list and human extraction of OOV term translation, this paper presents a machine learning method to select correct translations automatically. In the method, twenty-one different features for each Chinese translati...