Mining biomedical abstracts: What's in a term?

In this paper we present a study of the usage of terminology in the biomedical literature, with the main aim to indicate phenomena that can be helpful for automatic term recognition in the domain. Our analysis is based on the terminology appearing in the Genia corpus. We analyse the usage of biomedical terms and their variants (namely inflectional and orthographic alternatives, terms with prepositions, coordinated terms, etc.), showing the variability and dynamic nature of terms used in biomedical abstracts. Term coordination and terms containing prepositions are analysed in detail. We also show that there is a discrepancy between terms used in the literature and terms listed in controlled dictionaries. In addition, we briefly evaluate the effectiveness of incorporating treatment of different types of term variation into an automatic term recognition system.