Machine Translation on the Medical Domain: The Role of BLEU/NIST and METEOR in a Controlled Vocabulary Setting

The main objective of our project is to extract clinical information from thoracic radiology reports in Portuguese using Machine Translation (MT) and cross language information retrieval techniques. To accomplish this task we need to evaluate the involved machine translation system. Since human MT evaluation is costly and time consuming we opted to use automated methods. We propose an evaluation methodology using NIST/BLEU and METEOR algorithms and a controlled medical vocabulary, the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). A set of documents are generated and they are either machine translated or used as evaluation references. This methodology is used to evaluate the performance of our specialized Portuguese English translation dictionary. A significant improvement on evaluation scores after the dictionary incorporation into a commercial MT system is demonstrated. The use of UMLS and automated MT evaluation techniques can help the development of applications on the medical domain. Our methodology can also be used on general MT research for evaluating and testing purposes.