Constructing Cross-lingual Consumer Health Vocabulary with Word-Embedding from Comparable User Generated Content

The online health community (OHC) is the primary channel for laypeople to share health information. To analyze the health consumer-generated content (HCGC) from the OHCs, identifying the colloquial medical expressions used by laypeople is a critical challenge. The open-access and collaborative consumer health vocabulary (OAC CHV) is the controlled vocabulary for addressing such a challenge. Nevertheless, OAC CHV is only available in English, limiting the applicability to other languages. This research aims to propose a cross-lingual automatic term recognition framework for extending the English OAC CHV into a cross-lingual one. Our framework requires an English HCGC corpus and a non-English (i.e., Chinese in this study) HCGC corpus as inputs. Two monolingual word vector spaces are determined using skip-gram algorithm so that each space encodes common word associations from laypeople within a language. Based on isometry assumption, the framework align two monolingual spaces into a bilingual word vector space, where we employ cosine similarity as a metric for identifying semantically similar words across languages. In the experiments, our framework demonstrates that it can effectively retrieve similar medical terms, including colloquial expressions, across languages and further facilitate compilation of cross-lingual CHV.