Balisage Paper: Ontology based Biomedical Research Paper Authoring Support Tool
Senator Jeong
National Center for Medical Information and Knowledge, Korea National Institute of Health
Sejin Nam
Biomedical Knowledge Engineering Laboratory, Seoul National University
Hyun-Young Park
National Center for Medical Information and Knowledge, Korea National Institute of Health
Abstract
Biomedical research papers typically formatted as IMRAD structure: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. Even though following this format, writing a paper in English is challenging for authors, because the most difficult thing is to organize and present their ideas with appropriate expressions.
Our goal is to develop a paper authoring support system that helps biomedical scientists to organize their ideas for a specific discourse purpose. As an initial step toward the goal, this study developed an abstract authoring support tool that provides candidate lexical bundles organized according to IMRAD structure. Lexical bundles function as basic building blocks of this discourse structure. For example, the lexical bundle "the purpose of this study was" indicates the research purpose in the Introduction section. Lexical bundles were extracted from sentences in 152,083 structured abstracts of the PubMed Central Open Access Subset and analyzed their distribution by IMRAD sections. To organize lexical bundles according to IMRAD, the Lexical Bundle Ontology was built. Then, a JATS-compliant authoring support tool was implemented. This tool lists up candidate lexical bundles responding to authors' discourse purposes in a specific section and thereby helps to complete sentences. We present a use case scenario of this authoring support tool. We expect that this tool be a useful, at least in biomedical abstract writing, to organize author's ideas to achieve specific discourse purpose. This tool is target to primarily for biomedical scientists whose mother tongue is not English. However, native speakers may still find the utility.