Accurate and Efficient Parsing of Biomedical Text

自然语言处理是人工智能的一个分支，涉及使用计算机自动处理和理解自然语言。自然语言是指英语、法语、德语等语言，而不是人工计算机编程语言。这将是21世纪的一项重要技术，原因有很多。首先，计算机在我们的社会中变得越来越重要，能够以一种自然的方式与它们交流，使用口语和书面语，将变得更加可取。第二，我们正在产生非常大量的在线电子信息；我们需要能够自动处理这些信息、总结信息、回答问题、翻译信息、查找相关文档的工具。b谷歌的惊人增长证明了这种技术的重要性。拟议的研究涉及处理一种特定类型的文本，即生物研究界产生的科学文章。生物学每年产生大量的新文章，太多了，任何一个人都无法跟上时代的步伐。需要能处理这些信息的自动计算机工具。例如，生物学家可能想知道网络上是否有一篇论文回答了关于某个基因的特定问题。复杂的文本处理，如将文档从一种语言翻译成另一种语言、总结文档或回答问题，需要复杂的语言处理工具。对于这类任务，一个非常有用的工具是解析器，它可以自动确定句子的语法结构以及句子中单词的关系。例如，它会决定句子中的动词，以及名词与动词的关系。如果计算机能够理解文本，这些信息是必需的。自然语言处理社区现在有非常好的解析技术。然而，现有的解析器擅长分析某些类型的文本，比如报纸，但不擅长分析其他类型的文本，比如生物学研究论文。原因是解析器从人类创造的语言资源中学习语言，而这些资源是基于报纸文本的。从零开始为生物学创建这些资源将花费太长时间，因此提议的研究将研究如何将针对报纸文本调整的解析器移植到处理生物学文本。

Natural Language Processing is a branch of Artificial Intelligence concerned with using computers to automatically process and understand natural languages. Natural language refers to languages such as English, French, German, etc., rather than artificial computer programming languages. There are a number of reasons why this will be an important technology in the 21st century. First, computers are gaining increasing importance in our society, and being able to communicate with them in a natural way, using spoken and written language, will become more desirable. Second, we are producing very large amounts of online electronic information; we require tools which can automatically process this information, to summarise it, to answer questions about it, to translate it, to find relevant documents within it. The staggering rise of Google demonstrates the importance of this kind of technology.The proposed research concerns the processing of a particular kind of text, namely the scientific articles produced by the biological research community. Biology produces an enormous number of new articles each year, far too many for any one individual to keep up to date with. Automatic computer tools are required which can process this information. For example, a biologist might want to know whether there is a paper on the Web answering a particular question about some gene.Sophisticated text processing, such as translating a document from one language to another, summarising documents, or answering questions, requires sophisticated language processing tools. A very useful tool for these kinds of tasks is a parser , which automatically determines the grammatical structure of a sentence and how the words in the sentence are related. For example, it would determine the verbs in the sentence, and how the nouns are related to the verbs. This information is needed if a computer is to be able to understand the text.The Natural Language Processing community now has very good parsing technology. However, the existing parsers are good at analysing certain kinds of text, such as newspapers, but not so good at other kinds of text, such as biology research papers. The reason is that the parsers have learned about language from linguistic resources created by humans, and the resources are based on newspaper text. Creating these resources from scratch for biology would take too long, and so the proposed research will investigate ways in which parsers tuned for newpaper text can be ported to handle biological text.