EUROGENE: multilingual retrieval and machine translation applied to human genetics

The objective of Eurogene is to collect a critical mass of educational content in the field of human genetics in nine European languages and to build a platform that will support the retrieval, sharing and navigation over the learning content. The Eurogene platform is already operational and is being used by the genetics community. In this paper, a part of the Eurogene platform related to the retrieval and machine translation of domain specific content is described. Our contribution lies in an approach for domain-specific adaption of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) and machine translation (MT). The CLIR system is based on a multilingual domain ontology which is also used as a synchronization component between CLIR and MT. The MT system is adapted to the target domain using the terminology represented in the ontology and using statistical training performed on a collection of parallel texts. In the statistical training phase, new translations of a term can be discovered and used for ontology updating. The paper is organized as follows. First, we describe the motivation for our approach and the multilingual domain ontology. Later, the CLIR and MT components and their domain adaption and synchronization are discussed