Text Mining from the Web for Medical Intelligence

Global medical and epidemic surveillance is an essential function of Public Health agencies, whose mandate is to protect the public from major health threats. To perform this function effectively one requires timely and accurate medical information from a wide range of sources. In this work we present a freely accessible system designed to monitor disease epidemics by analysing textual reports, mostly in the form of news gathered from the Web. The system rests on two major components'MedISys, based on Information Retrieval technology, and PULS, an Information Extraction system.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen