From Witch's Shot to Music Making Bones -- Resources for Medical Laymen to Technical Language and Vice Versa

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new dataset for translating German laymen health language into medical terminology, enabling better extraction of health-related information from social media and forums.

Contribution

It provides a novel annotated dataset linking layman and medical expressions in German, along with baseline results for medical language translation.

Findings

New dataset with annotations for German medical layman and technical expressions

Baseline results demonstrating initial approaches to medical language translation

Resource for future research in health information extraction from social media

Abstract

Many people share information in social media or forums, like food they eat, sports activities they do or events which have been visited. This also applies to information about a person's health status. Information we share online unveils directly or indirectly information about our lifestyle and health situation and thus provides a valuable data resource. If we can make advantage of that data, applications can be created that enable e.g. the detection of possible risk factors of diseases or adverse drug reactions of medications. However, as most people are not medical experts, language used might be more descriptive rather than the precise medical expression as medics do. To detect and use those relevant information, laymen language has to be translated and/or linked to the corresponding medical concept. This work presents baseline data sources in order to address this challenge for German. We introduce a new data set which annotates medical laymen and technical expressions in a patient forum, along with a set of medical synonyms and definitions, and present first baseline results on the data.