The @Note biomedical text mining workbench

Abstract

[Excerpt] Biomedical Text Mining. i.e., the field that deals with the automatic: retrieval and processing of biomedical literature, is perhaps one of today's most promising research fields. The automated processing of free text is not exactly a new computational issue. Text Mining has a long experience in the retrieval and processing of general text. The development of search engines and indexed directories, the compilation of dictionaries and the automatic translation of documents have impelled the development of powerful text processing techniques. Nevertheless, biomedical texts present additional challenges: the terminology does not always follows standard nomenclatures; new terms are constantly emerging; and term homonymy and synonymy (including term variants and abbreviations) make it very difficult to accurately identify entities. [...]