Place: Duthie Ctr, Room 117
Date: Friday, March 12, 2010
Reception: 3:00 – 3:30pm, Duthie Center 2nd Floor
Seminar 3:30

BioTUS: A Biomedical Text Understanding System

Speaker: Dr. Hyoil Han
The World Wide Web made it possible for people and organizations to create and publish their work online and in various other electronic data sources. This technology led to the creation of a massive amount of information. For example, whereas people use Google to search for information or articles, biomedical researchers search for articles using PubMed, a service similar to Google to biomedical researchers and a service of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that contains over 19 million articles. Manually searching for and processing such an abundant amount of data is just not plausible---a simple keyword query on PubMed may return over 10,000 responses. To improve such a hostile online research environment, this talk presents BioTUS (Biomedical Text Understanding System), an intelligent system for biomedical text understanding that uses language modeling and semantic similarity. BioTUS consists of Semantic Annotation, Text Summarization, and Questions Answering modules. In this talk, I will present the main idea of the system that is to identify concepts and their semantic coherence and semantic similarity using natural language processing and information retrieval approaches that are based on concepts rather than terms. Beyond its obvious benefits to the biomedical domain, the potential impact of this research includes: (a) making new services, such as question answering and reasoning, easily achievable, (b) making information extraction from unstructured data easily applicable to other domains via adaptive techniques, and (c) equipping digital libraries with better indexing and services for updating and classifying the latest literature.

Short bio of Hyoil Han:
Hyoil Han is an Associate Professor in the LeMoyne-Owen College. She obtained her BS and MS degrees from Korea University and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, respectively. She worked for Samsung Electronics and Korea Telecom before obtaining a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2002. Dr. Han’s research areas lie in the merging of techniques from the fields of databases and artificial intelligence and applying the new, combined techniques to biomedical informatics and the Semantic Web with an emphasis on text/data mining and data integration/management. She is currently organizing a technical track titled “The Semantic Web and Applications” for the ACM Symposium of Applied Computing 2010. Dr. Han has been a principal investigator for the project “Advanced Intelligent System for Generating Electronic Medical Records,” which is funded by the Collaborative Research Experience for Undergraduates in Computer Science and Engineering. Dr. Han is a member of the ACM, the IEEE and the AAAI, and has published over 40 papers in refereed literature related to her research.