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                       BIOINFORMATICS COLLOQUIUM
                    School of Computational Sciences
                        George Mason University
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              Information Extraction for Biomedical Science

                             Victor Pollara
                            Mitretek Systems

                       Tuesday, October 26, 2004
                                4:30 pm
               Verizon Auditorium, Prince William Campus

With the number of completed clinical trials already exceeding 300,000,
how does one find information and how does one evaluate the results, the
validity, and the usefulness of a clinical study given this information
overload?  Information retrieval (i.e. document indexing) is a crude
tool used to search for documents containing complex biological and
medical information.  But it presents users with whole, uninterpreted
documents which they must read to find the sought-after facts.
Information Extraction (IE) is revolutionary in the sense that its
purpose is to locate, extract, and organize the facts contained in
documents.  IE and the ontological data modeling needed to support it
are complex problems, and the technologies for addressing them are not
yet mature, but increasingly sophisticated commercial and academic
software has brought the prospect of practical, ontologically driven IE
close to hand.  This talk describes an ongoing research project at
Mitretek Systems, in which the goal is to integrate cutting edge natural
language processing, information extraction, and ontological modeling of
biomedical knowledge in order to extract, organize, and analyze the
biomedical information in clinical trials reports, and to provide the
world of biomedical research with an unprecedented resource for
analyzing the extracted information.

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Refreshments are served at 4:00 pm.  Find the schedule and directions at
http://www.binf.gmu.edu/colloq.html