3 ms·
It's interesting that OP did seemingy little research with respect to existing work in the field. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline/medline_overview.html https:/
by JackFr 5y ago
It's interesting that OP did seemingy little research with respect to existing work in the field.
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline/medline_overview.html https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline/medline_overview.html
Medline, a searchable online directory of medical research papers has existed for 50 years. The National Library of Medicine for many years was a leader in document search and retrieval before there was a web. In the 80's they were doing vector cosine document similarity, document clustering and automated classifcation. They were also doing so great stuff like indexing papers based on proteins and gene sequences - so a paper which might be in a field completely different than yours might pop up if a similar protein or sequence was mentioned.
(Disclosure - I worked at the National Library of Medicine in the 90's)
That being said, in the past 30 years search and retrieval exploded to say nothing of ML, but its crazy to ignore the stuff which has come before, AND it's tough to compete with a national lab whose mandate is to basically give the stuff away.
- inlitro 5y ago100% It also felt like a long apology/explanation for Emergent Ventures rather than a true deep analysis. Pretty strong (and often false) statements for only what seems like half a year of total, somewhat vague work.
- stevenbedrick 5y agoThe best thing about the NLM's work in this space is how deeply it has been informed by the needs and workflows of the biomedical researchers, which is a perspective that has been sorely lacking in work coming from outsiders. I did think that the author did a good job of outlining (some of) the basic structural issues that make this a tough field to monetize, but even setting those aside, there's no substitute for actually knowing your users and what they need, and that's something the NLM is amazing at. (Disclosure, my PhD was funded by an NLM training grant, some of my research is funded extramurally by the NLM, and I have a lot of NLM colleagues, so I'm maybe a little bit biased)
- Ldorigo 5y agoMedline is great on all levels but what does it have to do with the author's work/product/topic? It's a database of biomedical articles. It's searchable using usual text search ("concept A" AND "concept B"), and has some additional features like MESH terms and metadata. The author is talking about extracting entity-level information from those article and building knowledge bases. Medline provides access to the raw data, but it does nothing like what the article describes (well - there's https://lhncbc.nlm.nih.gov/ii/tools/SemRep_SemMedDB_SKR.html https://lhncbc.nlm.nih.gov/ii/tools/SemRep_SemMedDB_SKR.html , so not entirely true. But it's hardly a final answer to the problem or even close to being usable enough that it makes commercial solutions pointless)