Harnessing Biomedical Natural Language Processing Tools to Identify Medicinal Plant Knowledge from Historical Texts
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
11-7-2017
Abstract
The growing amount of data describing historical medicinal uses of plants from digitization efforts provides the opportunity to develop systematic approaches for identifying potential plant-based therapies. However, the task of cataloguing plant use information from natural language text is a challenging task for ethnobotanists. To date, there have been only limited adoption of informatics approaches used for supporting the identification of ethnobotanical information associated with medicinal uses. This study explored the feasibility of using biomedical terminologies and natural language processing approaches for extracting relevant plant-associated therapeutic use information from historical biodiversity literature collection available from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The results from this preliminary study suggest that there is potential utility of informatics methods to identify medicinal plant knowledge from digitized resources as well as highlight opportunities for improvement.
Conference/Symposium
American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2017 Annual Symposium
City/State
Washington, D.C.
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Recommended Citation
Sharma, V., Law, W., Balick, M. J., & Sarkar, I. N. (2017, November 4-8). Harnessing biomedical natural language processing tools to identify medicinal plant knowledge from historical texts [Conference proceeding]. American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2017 Annual Symposium, Washington, DC, United States.
