Data Normalization Improves Semantic Annotation – a Case Study of Rare Disease Name Annotation

Despite the individually low prevalence of rare diseases, they collectively constitute a big challenge to human health. Accurate annotation of rare diseases in biomedical data through natural language processing (NLP) could be instrumental in biomedical informatics research. Herein, we propose a data normalization-based annotation approach, complementary to the popular biomedical data annotation tool named MetaMap, for disease annotation from biomedical data in free text.