Syntactic, Semantic and Referential Patterns in Biomedical Texts: towards in-depth text comprehension for the purpose of bioinformatics

An essential part of bioinformatic research concerns the iterative process of validating hypotheses by analyzing facts stored in databases and in published literature. This process can be enhanced by automatic in-depth text understanding. A prerequisite for this is an adequate syntactic and semantic analysis. The paper presents the results of syntactic, semantic, and textual analysis of a corpus of biomedical abstracts. It focuses on the ways in which relevant molecular interactions are referred to in the abstracts, and proposes a strategy for linking natural language expressions to the standard notation used in Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes. The syntactic and semantic regularities observed in the language of biomedicine are also discussed from the cognitive point of view.