Semantic Interpretation for the Biomedical Research Literature

Abstract

Natural language processing is increasingly used to support biomedical applications that manipulate information rather than documents. Examples include automatic summarization, question answering, and literature-based scientific discovery. Semantic processing is a method of automatic language analysis that identifies concepts and relationships to represent document content. The identification of this information depends on structured knowledge, and in the biomedical domain, one such resource is the Unified Medical Language System. After providing some linguistic background, we discuss several semantic interpretation systems being developed in biomedicine. Finally, we briefly investigate two applications that exploit semantic information in MEDLINE citations; one focuses on automatic summarization and the other is directed at information extraction for molecular biology research.