An overview of biomedical entity linking throughout the years

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2022.104252Get rights and content
Under an Elsevier user license
open archive

Highlights

  • Presents an overview of biomedical entity linking, past, current and future.

  • Highlights shortcomings of current approaches to biomedical entity linking.

  • Identifies technical areas ripe for improvement.

Abstract

Biomedical Entity Linking (BEL) is the task of mapping of spans of text within biomedical documents to normalized, unique identifiers within an ontology. This is an important task in natural language processing for both translational information extraction applications and providing context for downstream tasks like relationship extraction. In this paper, we will survey the progression of BEL from its inception in the late 80s to present day state of the art systems, provide a comprehensive list of datasets available for training BEL systems, reference shared tasks focused on BEL, discuss the technical components that comprise BEL systems, and discuss possible directions for the future of the field.

Keywords

Natural language processing
Entity linking
Normalization

Cited by (0)