Statistical machine translation for biomedical text: are we there yet?

AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2011:2011:1290-9. Epub 2011 Oct 22.

Abstract

In our paper we addressed the research question: "Has machine translation achieved sufficiently high quality to translate PubMed titles for patients?". We analyzed statistical machine translation output for six foreign language - English translation pairs (bi-directionally). We built a high performing in-house system and evaluated its output for each translation pair on large scale both with automated BLEU scores and human judgment. In addition to the in-house system, we also evaluated Google Translate's performance specifically within the biomedical domain. We report high performance for German, French and Spanish -- English bi-directional translation pairs for both Google Translate and our system.

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study
  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

  • Artificial Intelligence*
  • Natural Language Processing
  • PubMed*
  • Search Engine
  • Translating*