BioTermEvo ("Detecting the Evolution of Biomedical Domain Terminology") is a project/fellowship funded by the Sciex commission. The project will be carried out by Dr. Gintarė Grigonytė. She will work with the members of the OntoGene project, under the joint supervision of Prof. Martin Volk and Dr. Fabio Rinaldi.

Abstract

Since the emergence of the Internet, vast amounts of electronic texts have become readily available, allowing increasing automation of the process of acquisition, storage, organization and sharing of information. Information extraction (IE) and information retrieval (IR) are leading research disciplines which aim at developing methods to automatically classify, select and extract the relevant information. Successful IR and IE systems often rely on using terms and keywords, for instance examples of applications where terminology is being used are queries for document search (Li and Chen, 2009) or for relation extraction tasks from domain specific literature (Rinaldi et al., 2010). Up until recently very little research has been done related to the fact that terms evolve during time and thus directly effect applications like document search or relations/event extraction.

As a broader implication, the evolution of the terminology indicates the evolving knowledge and thus might even suggest the emerging of new domain fields or changing of the discourse. The proposed project aims at developing methods for detecting the evolution of the terminology. Terminological evolution can be observed as a shift of lexical items and a shift of the semantic meaning.

References

Huian Li and Jake Yue Chen. 2009. Improved biomedical document retrieval system with PubMed term statistics and expansions. Int. J. Comput. Intell. Bioinformatics Syst. Biol. 1(1).

Fabio Rinaldi, Gerold Schneider, Kaarel Kaljurand, Simon Clematide, Therese Vachon, Martin Romacker. OntoGene in BioCreative II.5. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, vol. 99, no. 1, 2010.