Slicing through the Scientific Literature

Success in the life sciences depends on access to information in knowlegde bases and literature. Finding and extracting the relevant information depends on a user's domain knowledge and the knowledge of the search technology. In this paper we present a system that helps users formulate queries and search the scientific literature. The system coordinates ontologies, knowledge representation, text mining and NLP techniques to generate relevant queries in response to keyword input from the user. Queries are presented in natural language, translated to formal query syntax and issued to a knowledge base of scientific literature, documents or aligned document segments. We describe the components of the system and exemplify using real-world examples.