Constructing Japanese MeSH term dictionaries related to the COVID-19 literature

Atsuko Yamaguchi; Terue Takatsuki; Yuka Tateisi; Felipe Soares

doi:10.5808/gi.21012

Constructing Japanese MeSH term dictionaries related to the COVID-19 literature

Genomics Inform. 2021 Sep;19(3):e25. doi: 10.5808/gi.21012. Epub 2021 Sep 30.

Authors

Atsuko Yamaguchi¹, Terue Takatsuki², Yuka Tateisi³, Felipe Soares⁴

Affiliations

¹ Graduate School of Integrative Science and Engineering, Tokyo City University, Tokyo 158-8557, Japan.
² Database Center for Life Science, Research Organization of Information and Systems, Kashiwa 277-0871, Japan.
³ National Bioscience Database Center, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Chiyoda, Tokyo 102-8666, Japan.
⁴ Computer Science Department, The University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK.

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a flood of research papers and the information has been updated with considerable frequency. For society to derive benefits from this research, it is necessary to promote sharing up-to-date knowledge from these papers. However, because most research papers are written in English, it is difficult for people who are not familiar with English medical terms to obtain knowledge from them. To facilitate sharing knowledge from COVID-19 papers written in English for Japanese speakers, we tried to construct a dictionary with an open license by assigning Japanese terms to MeSH unique identifiers (UIDs) annotated to words in the texts of COVID-19 papers. Using this dictionary, 98.99% of all occurrences of MeSH terms in COVID-19 papers were covered. We also created a curated version of the dictionary and uploaded it to PubDictionary for wider use in the PubAnnotation system.

Keywords: COVID-19; Japanese; MeSH; medical vocabulary.