title: Automatic extraction of gene and protein synonyms from MEDLINE and journal articles.
abstract: Genes and proteins are often associated with multiple names, and more names are added as new functional or structural information is discovered. Because authors often alternate between these synonyms, information retrieval and extraction benefits from identifying these synonymous names. We have developed a method to extract automatically synonymous gene and protein names from MEDLINE and journal articles. We first identified patterns authors use to list synonymous gene and protein names. We developed SGPE (for synonym extraction of gene and protein names), a software program that recognizes the patterns and extracts from MEDLINE abstracts and full-text journal articles candidate synonymous terms. SGPE then applies a sequence of filters that automatically screen out those terms that are not gene and protein names. We evaluated our method to have an overall precision of 71% on both MEDLINE and journal articles, and 90% precision on the more suitable full-text articles alone
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, NY 10032, USA.
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.forename: Vasileios
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Hatzivassiloglou
authors.forename: Carol
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Friedman
authors.forename: Andrey
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rzhetsky
authors.forename: W John
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: Wilbur
mesh_terms: D001330:Electronic Data Processing; D005796:Genes; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D016239:MEDLINE; D009275:Names; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D011506:Proteins; D012984:Software
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins