A dictionary to identify small molecules and drugs in free text.
BACKGROUND
From the scientific community, a lot of effort has been spent on the correct identification of gene and protein names in text, while less effort has been spent on the correct identification of chemical names. Dictionary-based term identification has the power to recognize the diverse representation of chemical information in the literature and map the chemicals to their database identifiers.


RESULTS
We developed a dictionary for the identification of small molecules and drugs in text, combining information from UMLS, MeSH, ChEBI, DrugBank, KEGG, HMDB and ChemIDplus. Rule-based term filtering, manual check of highly frequent terms and disambiguation rules were applied. We tested the combined dictionary and the dictionaries derived from the individual resources on an annotated corpus, and conclude the following: (i) each of the different processing steps increase precision with a minor loss of recall; (ii) the overall performance of the combined dictionary is acceptable (precision 0.67, recall 0.40 (0.80 for trivial names); (iii) the combined dictionary performed better than the dictionary in the chemical recognizer OSCAR3; (iv) the performance of a dictionary based on ChemIDplus alone is comparable to the performance of the combined dictionary.


BACKGROUND
The combined dictionary is freely available as an XML file in Simple Knowledge Organization System format on the web site http://www.biosemantics.org/chemlist.
Hettne
Kristina M
KM
Department of Health Risk Analysis and Toxicology, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands. k.hettne@erasmusmc.nl
Stierum
Rob H
RH
Schuemie
Martijn J
MJ
Hendriksen
Peter J M
PJ
Schijvenaars
Bob J A
BJ
Mulligen
Erik M van
EM
Kleinjans
Jos
J
Kors
Jan A
JA
D000043:Abstracting and Indexing / Q000379:methods; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D004014:Dictionaries as Topic; D004015:Dictionaries, Chemical as Topic; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations / Q000737:chemistry; D012984:Software; D017432:Unified Medical Language System
D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations