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Presenter: Dr. Wanda Pratt - Associate Professor, Division of Biomedical & Health Informatics and the Information School, University of Washington, U.S.A.
Supervisor: Dr. M. Storey - Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department

Date: Fri, September 5, 2003
Time: 11:00:00 - 12:00:00
Place: David Strong Building (DSB), Room C 113

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT:

Because huge quantities of information are published each day, most researchers struggle to keep abreast of work within their own narrow specialization and spend little or no time examining the literature from other related disciplines. However, such isolation can stagnant research progress; many innovations occur only when traditional field boundaries are bridged.

This problem is particularly acute in the domain of biomedicine, where MEDLINE, the field's primary bibliographic database, adds over 2000 new references each day. New tools are needed to help researchers capture and explore the knowledge in this vast and rapidly growing literature. We have developed a system, called LitLinker, which provides a first step toward meeting this need. LitLinker bridges traditional field boundaries to identify and link together previously obscured connections in the biomedical literature. Our approach incorporates knowledge-based methodologies, natural-language processing techniques, and data-mining algorithms to mine the biomedical literature for new, potentially causal links between biomedical terms. We also created an interface to this text-mining system to help researchers visualize and explore the identified links. To evaluate LitLinker, we examined its performance on a well-known text-mining example.

Biography:

Dr. Pratt is an Assistant Professor in both the Division of Biomedical & Health Informatics and the Information School at the University of Washington. In 1999, she received her Ph.D. in Medical Informatics from Stanford University. She received her M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas, and her B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Kansas. Her experience in knowledge-based systems dates back to the late eighties when she developed a medical expert system for NASA, and in the early to mid nineties when she worked on CYC project to represent all of common-sense knowledge. Her recent research focuses on knowledge-based methods to retrieve, organize, mine, and present textual medical information. She is also a recent recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, which funds this text-mining research.