Distilling Conceptual Connections from MeSH Co-Occurrences

Our aim is to contribute to biomedical text extraction and mining research. In this paper we present exploratory research on the MeSH terms assigned to MEDLINE citations. We analyze MeSH based co-occurrences and identify the interesting ones, i.e., those that are likely to be semantically meaningful. For each selected co-occurring pair we derive a weighted vector representation that emphasizes the verb based functional aspects of the underlying semantics. Preliminary experiments exploring the potential value of these vectors gave us very good results. The larger goal of this project is to contribute to knowledge discovery research by mining the knowledge that is latent within the biomedical literature. It is also to provide a method capable of suggesting cross-disciplinary connections via the pairs derived from all of MEDLINE.