Testing concept indexing in crosslingual medical text classification

MetaMap is an online application that allows mapping text to UMLS Metathesaurus concepts, which is very useful for interoperability among different languages and systems within the biomedical domain. MetaMap Transfer (MMTx) is a Java program that makes MetaMap available to biomedical researchers in controlled, configurable environment. Currently there is no Spanish version of MetaMap, which difficult the use of UMLS Metathesaurus to extract concepts from Spanish biomedical texts. Developing a Spanish version of MetaMap would be a huge task, since there has been a lot of work supporting the English version for the last sixteen years. Our ongoing research is mainly focused on using biomedical concepts for crosslingual text classification. In this context the use of concepts instead of bag of words representation allows us to face text classification tasks abstracting from the language. In this paper we show our experiments on combining automatic translation techniques with the use of biomedical ontologies to produce an English text that can be processed by MMTx in order to extract concepts for text classification.