An Analytical Framework for Indian Medicinal Plants and Their Disease Curing Properties

Apart from being a rich source of nutrients, medicinal treatment with medicinal plants hold a strong ground because these plants seem to be safe with least aftereffects. Medicinal Plants or herbs possess a special quality or phyto_property that enables them to combat multitude of health issues. This paper is a noble attempt to unearth these disease curing properties of medicinal plants from biomedical literature. The proposed architecture discusses a text mining based literatures mining technique to derive information between biomedical entities like properties of medicinal plants (e.g. anti inflammatory, antioxidant) and disease (e.g. arthritis). Unlike exiting heuristic attempts involving syntactic patterns, co-occurrence analysis, we propose a Verb Between Entities (VBE) algorithm which attempts to discover relationship between entities by analyzing the main verb between them. The framework also incorporates UMLs thesaurus to help identifying verb phrases which includes functional concepts in the course of verb analysis. Performance of the framework has been evaluated on multiple datasets and the outcomes indicate that the recommended framework is more effective in identifying functional semantic relations as compared with the other relevant methods.