Automatic classification of verbs in biomedical texts

Abstract

Lexical classes, when tailored to the application and domain in question, can provide an effective means to deal with a number of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. While manual construction of such classes is difficult, recent research shows that it is possible to automatically induce verb classes from cross-domain corpora with promising accuracy. We report a novel experiment where similar technology is applied to the important, challenging domain of biomedicine. We show that the resulting classification, acquired from a corpus of biomedical journal articles, is highly accurate and strongly domain-specific. It can be used to aid BIO-NLP directly or as useful material for investigating the syntax and semantics of verbs in biomedical texts. © 2006 Association for Computational Linguistics.