=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1179/CLEF2013wn-CLEFER-Bodenreider2013
|storemode=property
|title=Multi-lingual Features of the Unified Medical Language System
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1179/CLEF2013wn-CLEFER-Bodenreider2013.pdf
|volume=Vol-1179
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/clef/Bodenreider13
}}
==Multi-lingual Features of the Unified Medical Language System==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1179/CLEF2013wn-CLEFER-Bodenreider2013.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
         Multi-lingual Features of the Unified Medical Language System
                                                  Olivier Bodenreider
          Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, USA
                                                  obodenreider@mail.nih.gov

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a terminology integration system developed and
maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). Over the past 20 years, the UMLS
Metathesaurus has been extended to encompass 168 source vocabularies. While English is the
dominant language (116 source vocabularies), 52 vocabularies in the Metathesaurus are in languages
other than English (6 in Dutch, German and Spanish ; 5 in French ; 4 in Italian and Portuguese ; 2 in
Czech, Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian and Swedish ; and 1 in Basque, Croatian,
Danish, Hebrew, Latvian, Polish and Russian).
NLM does not translate any of these vocabularies, but rather integrates translations of English
vocabularies when they are available. Examples include the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) present in
the Metathesaurus in 16 languages ; the International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC) in 14 ; the
Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities Terminology (MedDRA) in 10 ; and the WHO Adverse Drug
Reaction Terminology in 5. Of note, SNOMED CT and the Physicians' Current Procedural Terminology
(CPT) are both present in English and Spanish, because these two languages are the main languages
used in the U.S.
Synonymous terms from source vocabularies are clustered into a UMLS concept regardless of language.
This feature of the Metathesaurus makes it easy for users to identify non-English synonyms for a given
concept and, conversely, to identify a concept from a term in a given language. Ignoring obsolete
concepts, the Metathesaurus contains 2.8M concepts with English terms. With terms in 12% of the
concepts, Spanish is the second most represented language in the Metathesaurus (mainly due to the
presence of the Spanish translation of SNOMED CT). Other languages are represented in at most 3% of
the concepts. Separate word indexes are provided for each language. The Metathesaurus has adopted
the Unicode character set over 10 years ago and uses UTF-8 for character encoding.
UMLS users have taken advantage of the parallel corpus provided by the integration of vocabularies in
multiple languages. Cross-lingual information retrieval systems such as BabelMeSH and MorphoSaurus
leverage the UMLS Metathesaurus, which has also been used to support the translation of vocabularies
such as SNOMED CT and the Foundational Model of Anatomy, and for acquiring parallel lexicons.
The UMLS is available at https://uts.nlm.nih.gov/. Using the UMLS Metathesaurus requires a free
license, due to intellectual property restrictions with some of the source vocabularies.

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