JUFIT: A Configurable Rule Engine for Filtering and Generating New Multilingual UMLS Terms

We here describe JuFiT, an easily adjustable rule engine which allows to filter non-natural terms (i.e., ones usually not occurring in running citation texts) from the Umls metathesaurus and even adds new terms to the UMLS (by rewriting non-natural terms). Unlike previous attempts (with MetaMap or Casper), JuFiT serves multilingual purposes in that it runs for English, Spanish, French, German and Dutch documents, as well - the most prominent European languages in terms of UMLS coverage. We evaluated JuFiT under a variety of experimental conditions and found evidence that it increases annotation quality for English, and most likely also for German and Spanish.