BIOSSES: a semantic sentence similarity estimation system for the biomedical domain

Motivation: The amount of information available in textual format is rapidly increasing in the biomedical domain. Therefore, natural language processing (NLP) applications are becoming increasingly important to facilitate the retrieval and analysis of these data. Computing the semantic similarity between sentences is an important component in many NLP tasks including text retrieval and summarization. A number of approaches have been proposed for semantic sentence similarity estimation for generic English. However, our experiments showed that such approaches do not effectively cover biomedical knowledge and produce poor results for biomedical text.