Archived Talks

University of Pittsburgh Department of Biomedical Informatics Colloquium

The NLM Indexing Initiative
Speaker: Alan R. Aronson, PhD
Lister Hill Center, National Library of Medicine

Friday, March 16, 2007
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Room 305 A&B VALE
200 Meyran Avenue

The Indexing Initiative (II) is an NLM research project devoted to exploring both semi-automatic and fully automated methods for indexing biomedical text, especially the MEDLINE database of the biomedical literature. After exploring several indexing methodologies, the II team created the Medical Text Indexer (MTI) which has been in daily use by NLM's indexers since late 2002 to assist in assigning Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) terms to MEDLINE citations.

Dr. Aronson will briefly describe MTI as it exists today and then discuss current research efforts including (1) extending MTI's coverage from titles and abstracts to the full text of articles, (2) adding a subheading attachment capability to modify a heading's meaning (e.g., Aspirin/therapeutic use vs. Aspirin/adverse effects), and (3) applying MTI to indexing environments other than the originally intended ones.

For more information: jcumm@cbmi.pitt.edu or 412.647.7113