The comprehension of medical words: Cross-lingual experiments in French and Xhosa

Natalia Grabar (1) , Izak van Zyl (2) , Retha de La Harpe (2) , Thierry Hamon (3, 4)

1 STL - Savoirs, Textes, Langage (STL) - UMR 8163
2 CPUT - Cape Peninsula University of Technology
3 LIMSI - Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur
4 UP13 - Université Paris 13

This paper presents cross-lingual experiments in automatic detection of medical words that may be difficult to understand by patients. The study relies on Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods, conducted in three steps, across two languages, French and Xhosa: (1) the French data are processed by NLP methods and tools to reproduce the manual categorization of words as understandable or not; (2) the Xhosa data are clustered with a non-supervised algorithm; (3) an analysis of the Xhosa results and their comparison with the results observed on the French data is performed. Some similarities between the two languages are observed.

Mots clés: Health Literacy; Readability; Consumer Health Informatics; Natural Language Processing; Xhosa; French

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Natalia Grabar, Izak van Zyl, Retha de La Harpe, Thierry Hamon. The comprehension of medical words: Cross-lingual experiments in French and Xhosa. International Conference on Health Informatics, SCITEPRESS Digital Library, Jan 2014, Angers, France. ⟨hal-01972755⟩