PR ELRA: Distribution Agreement signed for BioLexicon

[info at elda.org]

Press Release - Immediate
Paris, France, September, 3rd 2009

Distribution Agreement signed for BioLexicon

ELRA together with the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI, Hinxton, 
UK), Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale-Consiglio Nazionale Ricerche 
(ILC-CNR, Pisa, Italy), and the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM, 
University of Manchester, UK) has signed a Language Resources 
distribution agreement for a large-scale English language terminological 
resource in the biomedical domain: *BioLexicon.*

Biological terminology is a frequent cause of analysis errors when 
processing literature written in the biology domain, due largely to the 
high degree of variation in term forms, to the frequent mis-matches 
between labels of controlled vocabularies and ontologies on the one hand 
and the forms actually occurring in text on the other, and to the lack 
of detailed formal information on the linguistic behaviour of domain 
terms. For example,  "retro-regulate" is a terminological verb often 
used in molecular biology but it is not included in conventional 
dictionaries. BioLexicon is a linguistic resource for the biology 
domain, tailored to cope with these problems. It contains information on:
    - terminological nouns, including nominalised verbs and proper names 
(e.g., gene names)
    - terminological adjectives
    - terminological adverbs
    - terminological verbs
    - general English words frequently used in the biology domain

Existing information on terms was integrated, augmented, complemented 
and linked, through processing of massive amounts of biomedical text, to 
yield inter alia over 2.2M entries, and information on over 1.8M 
variants and on over 2M synonymy relations. Moreover, extensive 
information is provided on how verbs and nominalised verbs in the domain 
behave at both syntactic and semantic levels, supporting thus 
applications aiming at discovery of relations and events involving 
biological entities in text.

This comprehensive coverage of biological terms makes BioLexicon a 
unique linguistic resource within the domain. It is primarily intended 
to support text mining and information retrieval in the biomedical
domain, however its standards-based structure and rich content make it a 
valuable resource for many other kinds of application.

On behalf of ELRA, ELDA will act as the distribution agency, by 
incorporating the BioLexicon in the ELRA Language Resources catalogue.

With these resources, ELRA is willing to extend the current catalogue, 
by offering specialized resources and thus allow a better coverage of 
the language.

For more information on BioLexicon (catalogue reference: ELRA-S0373): 
http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1113

For more information on the ELRA catalogue, please contact:
Valérie Mapelli, mapelli at elda.org

For more information on ELRA & ELDA, please contact:
Khalid Choukri, choukri at elda.org
Hélène Mazo, mazo at elda.org

ELDA
55-57, rue Brillat Savarin
75013 Paris (France)

Tel.: +33 1 43 13 33 33
Fax: +33 1 43 13 33 30


*** About ELRA ***
The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a non-profit 
making organisation founded by the European Commission in 1995, with the 
mission of providing a clearing house for language resources and 
promoting Human Language Technologies (HLT).

To find out more about ELRA, please visit our web site: http://www.elra.info

*** About ELDA ***
The Evaluation and Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) is 
ELRA's operational body. ELDA identifies, collects, markets, and 
distributes language resources, along with the dissemination of general 
information in the field of HLT. ELDA also participates in some 
evaluation projects and campaigns, has considerable knowledge and skills 
in HLT applications and has participated in many French, European and 
international projects.

To find out more about ELDA, please visit our web site: http://www.elda.org

*** About the partners: EBI, ILC-CNR and NaCTeM ***
To find out more about BioLexicon partners, please visit the following 
websites:
EBI: http://www.ebi.ac.uk
ILC-CNR: http://www.ilc.cnr.it
NaCTeM: http://www.nactem.ac.uk <http://www.nactem.ac.uk/>
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