25/11/2016

Thesis defence of Àlex Bravo Serrano: "BeFree: a text mining system for the extraction of biomedical information from the literature"

Next Monday, 28th of November at 11:00, Àlex Bravo Serrano, member of the Integrative Biomedical Informatics group of GRIB will defense his thesis "BeFree: a text mining system for the extraction of biomedical information from the literature" at Josep Marull room of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Abstract

Current biomedical research needs to leverage the large amount of information reported in scientific publications. Automated text processing, commonly known as text mining, has become an indispensable tool to identify, extract, organize and analyze the relevant biomedical information from the literature.

This thesis presents the BeFree system, a text mining tool for the extraction of biomedical information to support research in the genetic basis of disease and drug toxicity. BeFree can identify entities such as genes and diseases from a vast repository of biomedical text sources. Furthermore, by exploiting shallow and deep syntactic information of text, BeFree detects relationships between genes, diseases and drugs with a performance comparable to the state-of-the-art.

As a result, BeFree has been used in various applications in the biomedical field, with the aim to provide structured biomedical information for the development of knowledge and corpora resources. Furthermore, these resources are available to the scientific community for the development of novel text mining tools.