<div dir="ltr">UMLS is great, I use it all the time. But it's a kind of 'brute force' approach to identifying terms. My understanding of the original question was 'how do you identify a text string as potentially being drug name without a dictionary?' <div>
<br></div><div>The surrounding words can give useful cues as to whether the preceding or following one or two tokens might be a drug name, e.g. a dosage and/or administration route.</div><div><br></div><div>Phil</div></div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Ken Litkowski <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ken@clres.com" target="_blank">ken@clres.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<tt>The <a href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/index.html" target="_blank">Unified
Medical Language System</a> has all the medical terminology one
would ever want. It includes a component, <a href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/rxnorm/index.html" target="_blank">RxNorm</a>,
that provides a pretty thorough starting point for drug names.
Although these vast resources are essentially free in the U.S.,
there may be some restrictions outside the U.S.<br>
<br>
</tt><div><div class="h5">
<div>On 1/8/2013 10:45 AM, WHITELOCK, Pete
wrote:<br>
</div>
</div></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div class="h5">
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal">I’m interested in the problem of spotting
that a particular string that’s not in one’s dictionary is in
fact the name of a drug. New drugs and their names are being
created all the time and it’s pretty easy as a human to see a
string in isolation and see “yeh, that’s a drug name”. Anyone
done anything similar to this? I vaguely recall some
discussion of distinguishing boys’ and girls’ names (as an
exercise in some textbook?).<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In addition, does anyone know where to get
a list of drug names to use as the starting point. <u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Thanks for any help<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Pete Whitelock, PhD</span><span><br>
</span><span>Principal Language
Engineer, Technology<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Academic Dictionaries</span><span> <br>
</span><span>Oxford University
Press</span><span><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
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