Using multi-terminology indexing for the assignment of MeSH descriptors to health resources in a French online catalogue

BACKGROUND To assist with the development of a French online quality-controlled health gateway(CISMeF), an automatic indexing tool assigning MeSH descriptors to medical text in French was created. The French Multi-Terminology Indexer (FMTI) relies on a multi-terminology approach involving four prominent medical terminologies and the mappings between them. OBJECTIVE In this paper,we compare lemmatization and stemming as methods to process French medical text for indexing. We also evaluate the multi-terminology approach implemented in F-MTI. METHODS The indexing strategies were assessed on a corpus of 18,814 resources indexed manually. RESULTS There is little difference in the indexing performance when lemmatization or stemming is used. However, the multi-terminology approach outperforms indexing relying on a single terminology in terms of recall. CONCLUSION F-MTI will soon be used in the CISMeF production environment and in a Health MultiTerminology Server in French.