Open AccessTowards a semantic lexicon for biological language processing
Author(s) -
Verspoor Karin
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
comparative and functional genomics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1532-6268
pISSN - 1531-6912
DOI - 10.1002/cfg.451
Subject(s) - lexicon , unified medical language system , computer science , natural language processing , domain (mathematical analysis) , artificial intelligence , resource (disambiguation) , field (mathematics) , information retrieval , linguistics , mathematical analysis , computer network , philosophy , mathematics , pure mathematics
This paper explores the use of the resources in the National Library of Medicine's Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) for the construction of a lexicon useful for processing texts in the field of molecular biology. A lexicon is constructed from overlapping terms in the UMLS SPECIALIST lexicon and the UMLS Metathesaurus to obtain both morphosyntactic and semantic information for terms, and the coverage of a domain corpus is assessed. Over 77% of tokens in the domain corpus are found in the constructed lexicon, validating the lexicon's coverage of the most frequent terms in the domain and indicating that the constructed lexicon is potentially an important resource for biological text processing. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.