Applying Natural Language Processing Techniques to Bioinformatics

Considering that there is the lack of standards for storing genome-related on-line documents, the techniques in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is likely to become more and more important. It is necessary to extract useful information from the raw text and to store it in a computer-readable database format. Recent advances in NLP technologies raise new challenges and opportunities for tackling genome-related on-line text for information extraction task, For example, we can obtain many useful information related to genetic network or metabolic pathways simply by analyzing verbs such as 'activate'or 'inhibit'in Medline abstracts in a fully automatic way, Thus, combining NLP techniques with genome informatics extends beyond the traditional realms of either technology to a variety of emerging applications.