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International Conference on Information Technology in Bio- and Medical Informatics

ITBAM 2015: Information Technology in Bio- and Medical Informatics pp 3–15Cite as

From Literature to Knowledge: Exploiting PubMed to Answer Biomedical Questions in Natural Language

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9267))

Abstract

Researchers, practitioners and the general public strive to be constantly up to date with the latest developments in the subjects of bio-medical research of their interest. Meanwhile the collection of high quality research papers freely available on the Web has increase dramatically in the last few years and this trend is likely to continue. This state of facts brings about opportunities as well as challenges for the construction of effective web-based searching tools. Question/Answering systems based on user interactions in Natural Language have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional keyword based search engines. However this technology still needs to mature in order to fulfill its promises. In this paper we present and test a new graph-based proof-of-concept paradigm for processing the knowledge base and the user queries expressed in natural Language. The user query is mapped as a subgraph matching problem onto the internal graph representation, and thus can handle efficiently also partial matches. Preliminary user-based output quality measurements confirm the viability of our method.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.askhermes.org/.

  2. 2.

    http://eagl.unige.ch/EAGLi/.

  3. 3.

    http://services.hon.ch/cgi-bin/QA10.

  4. 4.

    http://www.clef-initiative.eu/.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the support of the Italian Registry of ccTLD “.it” and the ERCIM ‘Alain Bensoussan’ Fellowship Programme.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CNR, Institute for Informatics and Telematics, Via G. Moruzzi 1, Pisa, Italy

    Pinaki Bhaskar, Marina Buzzi, Filippo Geraci & Marco Pellegrini

Authors
  1. Pinaki Bhaskar
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  2. Marina Buzzi
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  3. Filippo Geraci
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  4. Marco Pellegrini
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Filippo Geraci .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Informatics and Telematics, Pisa, Italy

    M. Elena Renda

  2. Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

    Miroslav Bursa

  3. Medical University Graz, Graz, Austria

    Andreas Holzinger

  4. San Jose State University, San Jose, California, USA

    Sami Khuri

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Bhaskar, P., Buzzi, M., Geraci, F., Pellegrini, M. (2015). From Literature to Knowledge: Exploiting PubMed to Answer Biomedical Questions in Natural Language. In: Renda, M., Bursa, M., Holzinger, A., Khuri, S. (eds) Information Technology in Bio- and Medical Informatics. ITBAM 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9267. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22741-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22741-2_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22740-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22741-2

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