Multilingual enrichment of disease biomedical ontologies

TL;DR

This paper explores using open-source knowledge bases, specifically Wikidata, to automatically translate biomedical disease ontologies across multiple languages, aiming to improve coverage and quality efficiently.

Contribution

It demonstrates the feasibility of leveraging Wikidata for multilingual ontology translation, comparing its coverage and quality against commercial translation tools.

Findings

Wikidata provides substantial coverage for disease ontologies in multiple languages.

Second-order links through intermediate ontologies improve translation coverage.

Wikidata-based translations show comparable quality to Google Cloud Translation.

Abstract

Translating biomedical ontologies is an important challenge, but doing it manually requires much time and money. We study the possibility to use open-source knowledge bases to translate biomedical ontologies. We focus on two aspects: coverage and quality. We look at the coverage of two biomedical ontologies focusing on diseases with respect to Wikidata for 9 European languages (Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish) for both ontologies, plus Arabic, Chinese and Russian for the second one. We first use direct links between Wikidata and the studied ontologies and then use second-order links by going through other intermediate ontologies. We then compare the quality of the translations obtained thanks to Wikidata with a commercial machine translation tool, here Google Cloud Translation.