This week the conference Nordterm 2019  gathers terminologists from all Nordic countries in Copenhagen. The theme this year is The Role of Terminology in Language Technology Applications.

As a vivid example, Gerd Sjögren and Gustaf Sjögren from Interverbum Technology together with Henrik Andersen from Copenhagen Translation presented the PPPC project.

Increasingly, health care providers communicate digitally with patients. Unfortunately, doctors and patients often use different wording so bridging the gap between professional and non-professional terminology is critical to ensure that e-health applications are user-friendly and enable high quality care.

The Patient-Professional Communication Plugin (PPCP) project was initiated to develop a technical infrastructure that links multilingual professional and non-professional use, i e to close the gap between what the doctor conveys and what the patient understands.

TermWeb, the terminology and knowledge management system can also be used as

  • support for understanding specialised, professional, language, (getting explanations in everyday language or in your mother tongue).
  • as controlled language support (to select the preferred, most unambiguous terms while creating text, e.g registering medical record text)

Here is an example with text pasted from an online medical record. The blue terms are found in the background TermWeb database.

In this case, the everyday language synonyms or explanations of terms in the text are shown. The result view can be customized to your needs, depending on if you only need explanations of the specialist language texts in the same language as that of the medical record, or want help if you have another mother tongue.

The PPCP project was financed by Nordic Innovation and involves Lingsoft from Finland, Copenhagen Translation from Denmark and Interverbum Technology/TermWeb from Sweden.

Working under the auspices of the Nordic Council of Ministers, Nordic Innovation is a key player in implementing the Nordic trade, industry and innovation partnership program.

You will find the whole presentation here.