# WikiUMLS: Aligning UMLS to Wikipedia via Cross-lingual Neural Ranking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01281 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01281/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Cross-Domain Data Integration for Named Entity Disambiguation in Biomedical Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08228/) (2021)
- [Constructing Cross-lingual Consumer Health Vocabulary with Word-Embedding from Comparable User Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11612/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present our work on aligning the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) to Wikipedia, to facilitate manual alignment of the two resources. We propose a cross-lingual neural reranking model to match a UMLS concept with a Wikipedia page, which achieves a recall@1 of 72%, a substantial improvement of 20% over word- and char-level BM25, enabling manual alignment with minimal effort. We release our resources, including ranked Wikipedia pages for 700k UMLS concepts, and WikiUMLS, a dataset for training and evaluation of alignment models between UMLS and Wikipedia. This will provide easier access to Wikipedia for health professionals, patients, and NLP systems, including in multilingual settings.