MaSTerClass: a case-based reasoning system for the classification of biomedical terms

The sheer volume of textually described biomedical knowledge exerts the need for natural language processing (NLP) applications in order to allow flexible and efficient access to relevant information. Specialized semantic networks (such as biomedical ontologies, terminologies or semantic lexicons) can significantly enhance these applications by supplying the necessary terminological information in a machine-readable form. With the explosive growth of bio-literature, new terms (representing newly identified concepts or variations of the existing terms) may not be explicitly described within the network and hence cannot be fully exploited by NLP applications. Linguistic and statistical clues can be used to extract many new terms from free text. The extracted terms still need to be correctly positioned relative to other terms in the network. Classification as a means of semantic typing represents the first step in updating a semantic network with new terms.