NLP-NG — A new NLP system for biomedical text analysis

NLP-NG is a new NLP system consisting of three components: NG-CORE (language processing), NG-DB (database management), and NG-SEE (interactive visualization and entry). The ultimate goal of NLP-NG is to produce information retrieval systems in which users can choose full-text schema, adding specific items to focus their queries. Schema are created by a normalization process which elides adjunctive constructions as well as replacing items by prototypes. Biomedical text contains domain-specific constructions which are revealed by normalization. NLP-NG is based on Construction Grammar. Computationally, all representations are integer-based, allowing efficient storage, indexing, and retrieval. SEE, an Ajax web browser client, allows developers, linguists, and users to view a corpus and modify its properties. NLP-NG uses a 300 million word BioMed Central corpus. NLP-NG does not focus on specific strategies to extract limited classes of information from papers. Instead, it is a universal approach that can codify a wide variety of text in papers.