MUCHMORE develops technologies that will result in a prototype system for cross-lingual information organization and access for the medical domain. The project provides a framework in which at the same time existing technologies can be integrated and refined and new technologies can be developed. Main contributions of the project will be on research regarding the effective combination of statistical, knowledge-based and heterogeneous approaches and resources and, in connection with this, on the construction and expansion of domain specific concept hierarchies through multilingual term and relation extraction. This approach is driven by the availability of very rich concept hierarchies in the medical domain (International Classification of Diseases: ICD, Medical Subject Headings: MESH and the Unified Medical Language System: UMLS), as well as large, correspondingly classified document collections that help advance the state of the art over the usual cross-lingual retrieval based on search terms. The medical domain is therefore an advanced starting point for research into the use of concept hierarchies in cross-lingual information access and management.
- Research regarding the effective combination of statistical, knowledge-based and heterogeneous approaches and resources and their integrated use for cross-lingual information access and management, including performance evaluation for realistic information access tasks.
- Research and technology development concerning the automated acquisition and effective use of domain-specific concept hierarchies and corresponding multilingual linguistic resources (parallel and comparable corpora).
- Demonstration of a cross-lingual information access prototype system for the medical domain, and user evaluation of the system to ensure usability for real-life tasks.
