The goal of this research is to explore semantic similarity and relatedness measures to automatically determine the similarity or relatedness between biomedical and clinical concepts.

Software

UMLS-Interface This package provides a Perl interface to the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). The UMLS is a knowledge representation framework encoded designed to support broad scope biomedical research queries. There exists three major sources in the UMLS. The Metathesaurus which is a taxonomy of medical concepts, the Semantic Network which categorizes concepts in the Metathesaurus, and the SPECIALIST Lexicon which contains a list of biomedical and general English terms used in the biomedical domain. The UMLS-Interface package is set up to access the Metathesaurus and the Semantic Network present in a mysql database.

UMLS-Similarity This package is a suite of Perl modules that implement a number of semantic similarity measures. The measures use the UMLS-Interface module to access the UMLS to generate similarity scores between concepts. Currently, this package includes programs that implement the similarity measures described by Leacock & Chodorow (1998), Wu & Palmer (1994), Nguyen & Al-Mubaid (2006), Rada, et. al. (1989), Jiang & Conrath (1997), Resnik (1995) and Lin (1998), and the relatedness measures proposed by Banerjee & Pedersen (2002), Patwardhan (2003).