Background: Named entity recognition (NER) is an important first step for text mining the biomedical literature. Evaluating the performance of biomedical NER systems is impossible without a standardized test corpus. The annotation of such a corpus for gene/protein name NER is a difficult process due to the complexity of gene/protein names. We describe the construction and annotation of GENETAG, a corpus of 20K MEDLINE ® sentences for gene/protein NER. 15K GENETAG sentences were used for the BioCreAtIvE Task 1A Competition.

It is known that users of internet search engines often enter queries with misspellings in one or more search terms. Several web search engines make suggestions for correcting misspelled words, but the methods used are proprietary and unpublished to our knowledge. Here we describe the methodology we have developed to perform spelling correction for the PubMed search engine. Our approach is based on the noisy channel model for spelling correction and makes use of statistics harvested from user logs to estimate the probabilities of different types of edits that lead to misspellings. The unique problems encountered in correcting search engine queries are discussed and our solutions are outlined.

Motivation: With the explosion of biomedical literature and the evolution of online and open access, scientists are reading more articles from a wider variety of journals. Thus, the list of core journals relevant to their research may be less obvious and may often change over time. To help researchers quickly identify appropriate journals to read and publish in, we developed a web application for finding related journals based on the analysis of PubMed log data.Availability: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/IRET/JournalsContact: luzh@ncbi.nlm.nih.govSupplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

This study proposes a text similarity model to help biocuration efforts of the Conserved Domain Database (CDD). CDD is a curated resource that catalogs annotated multiple sequence alignment models for ancient domains and full-length proteins. These models allow for fast searching and quick identification of conserved motifs in protein sequences via Reverse PSI-BLAST. In addition, CDD curators prepare summaries detailing the function of these conserved domains and specific protein families, based on published peer-reviewed articles. To facilitate information access for database users, it is desirable to specifically identify the referenced articles that support the assertions of curator-composed sentences. Moreover, CDD curators desire an alert system that scans the newly published literature and proposes related articles of relevance to the existing CDD records. Our approach to address these needs is a text similarity method that automatically maps a curator-written statement to candidate sentences extracted from the list of referenced articles, as well as the articles in the PubMed Central database. To evaluate this proposal, we paired CDD description sentences with the top 10 matching sentences from the literature, which were given to curators for review. Through this exercise, we discovered that we were able to map the articles in the reference list to the CDD description statements with an accuracy of 77%. In the dataset that was reviewed by curators, we were able to successfully provide references for 86% of the curator statements. In addition, we suggested new articles for curator review, which were accepted by curators to be added into the reference list at an acceptance rate of 50%. Through this process, we developed a substantial corpus of similar sentences from biomedical articles on protein sequence, structure and function research, which constitute the CDD text similarity corpus. This corpus contains 5159 sentence pairs judged for their similarity on a scale from 1 (low) to 5 (high) doubly annotated by four CDD curators. Curator-assigned similarity scores have a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.70 and an inter-annotator agreement of 85%. To date, this is the largest biomedical text similarity resource that has been manually judged, evaluated and made publicly available to the community to foster research and development of text similarity algorithms.