Background: Like text in other domains, biomedical documents contain a range of terms with more than one possible meaning. These ambiguities form a significant obstacle to the automatic processing of biomedical texts. Previous approaches to resolving this problem have made use of various sources of information including linguistic features of the context in which the ambiguous term is used and domain-specific resources, such as UMLS.
Materials and methods: We compare various sources of information including ones which have been previously used and a novel one: MeSH terms. Evaluation is carried out using a standard test set (the NLM-WSD corpus).
Results: The best performance is obtained using a combination of linguistic features and MeSH terms. Performance of our system exceeds previously published results for systems evaluated using the same data set.
Conclusion: Disambiguation of biomedical terms benefits from the use of information from a variety of sources. In particular, MeSH terms have proved to be useful and should be used if available.