Using LMF to Shape a Lexicon for the Biomedical Domain

This paper describes the design, implementation and population of the BioLexicon in the framework of BootStrep, an FP6 project. The BioLexicon (BL) is a lexical resource designed for text mining in the bio-domain. It has been conceived to meet both domain requirements and upcoming ISO standards for lexical representation. The data model and data categories are compliant to the ISO Lexical Markup Framework and the Data Category Registry. The BioLexicon integrates features of lexicons and terminologies: term entries (and variants) derived from existing resources are enriched with linguistic features, including sub-categorization and predicate-argument information, extracted from texts. Thus, it is an extendable resource. Furthermore, the lexical entries will be aligned to concepts in the BioOntology, the ontological resource of the project. The BL implementation is an extensible relational database with automatic population procedures. Population relies on a dedicated input data structure allowing to upload terms and their linguistic properties and "pull-and-push" them in the database. The BioLexicon teaches that the state-of-the-art is mature enough to aim at setting up a standard in this domain. Being conformant to lexical standards, the BioLexicon is interoperable and portable to other areas.