Transfer-Based Learning-to-Rank Assessment of Medical Term Technicality

While measuring the readability of texts has been a long-standing research topic, assessing the technicality of terms has only been addressed more recently and mostly for the English language. In this paper, we train a learning-to-rank model to determine a specialization degree for each term found in a given list. Since no training data for this task exist for French, we train our system with non-lexical features on English data, namely, the Consumer Health Vocabulary, then apply it to French. The features include the likelihood ratio of the term based on specialized and lay language models, and tests for containing morphologically complex words. The evaluation of this approach is conducted on 134 terms from the UMLS Metathesaurus and 868 terms from the Eugloss thesaurus. The Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain obtained by our system is over 0.8 on both test sets. Besides, thanks to the learning-to-rank approach, adding morphological features to the language model features improves the results on the Eugloss thesaurus.