MScanner: a classifier for retrieving Medline citations

Background  

Keyword searching through PubMed and other systems is the standard means of retrieving information from Medline. However, ad-hoc retrieval systems do not meet all of the needs of databases that curate information from literature, or of text miners developing a corpus on a topic that has many terms indicative of relevance. Several databases have developed supervised learning methods that operate on a filtered subset of Medline, to classify Medline records so that fewer articles have to be manually reviewed for relevance. A few studies have considered generalisation of Medline classification to operate on the entire Medline database in a non-domain-specific manner, but existing applications lack speed, available implementations, or a means to measure performance in new domains.