The SPECIALIST lexicon has been developed to provide the lexical information needed for the SPECIALIST Natural Language Processing System (NLP) which includes SemRep, MetaMap, and the Lexical Tools. It is intended to be a general English lexicon that includes many biomedical terms. It provides comprehensive coverage of biomedical vocabulary as well as commonly occurring English words. The lexicon entry for each word or term records the syntactic categorization, variant forms (morphological information), and specification of acronyms.
The SPECIALIST Lexicon has been built since 1994 at National Library of Medicine. A tool called LexBuild was developed to automate and ease the building processes. LexBuild is an extremely important and useful tool for linguists to build the SPECIALIST lexicon and control the quality of LEXICON. In 2004, a centralized web-based tool, LexBuild, is developed and deployed to build the SPECIALIST lexicon. This new LexBuild system provides an easier way for building lexicon. It also helps to ensure the quality and completeness of lexical entries and increase lexical coverage. In addition, it's a more robust system for software maintenance. With features of this new LexBuild, the Lexical Systems group has moved to a new milestone of building the SPECIALIST Lexicon.