BioMedICUS Measures

A lightweight (small and dependency-free) Java 8 library for identifying and normalizing numbers
whether they occur as decimal numbers (“5.8”), decimal fractions (“1/4”), or English numerals
(“forty-two”). Also contains functionality for detecting unit-of-measurement words. This was
developed as a stand-alone component of
BioMedICUS, a biomedical and clinical NLP engine developed by
the NLP-IE Group at the University of Minnesota Institute for Health Informatics.

This project makes use of the 2017 SPECIALIST Lexicon number files. For more information about the
SPECIALIST Lexicon, see their
website and their
Terms & Conditions.

Using in your project

To use in a maven project, include the following in your pom:

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>edu.umn.biomedicus</groupId>
    <artifactId>biomedicus-measures</artifactId>
    <version>2.0.1</version>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

Alternatively, download the .jar and include that in your libraries.

Javadoc

You can find the api documentation for this project here

Detecting numbers in text

DetectorFactory factory = Numbers.createDetectorFactory();
CombinedNumberDetector detector = factory.createCombinedNumberDetector();
Iterable<Token> tokens = ...
for (NumberResult numberResult in detector.findNumbers(tokens)) {
  // do something with the detected number
}

Contact and Support

For issues or enhancement requests, feel free to submit to the Issues tab on GitHub.

BioMedICUS has a gitter chat and a
Google Group for contacting
developers with questions, suggestions or feedback.

About Us

BioMedICUS is developed by the
University of Minnesota Institute for Health Informatics NLP/IE Group
with assistance from the
Open Health Natural Language Processing (OHNLP) Consortium.

Contributing

Anyone is welcome and encouraged to contribute. If you discover a bug, or think the project could
use an enhancement, follow these steps:

1. Create an issue and offer to code a solution. We can discuss the issue and decide whether any
   code would be a good addition to the project.
2. Fork the project. [https://github.com/nlpie/biomedicus-measures/fork]
3. Create Feature branch (git checkout -b feature-name)
4. Code your solution.
   • Follow the Google style guide for Java.
     There are IDE profiles available here.
   • Write unit tests for any non-trivial aspects of your code. If you are fixing a bug write a
     regression test: one that confirms the behavior you fixed stays fixed.
5. Commit to branch. (git commit -am 'Summary of changes')
6. Push to GitHub (git push origin feature-name)
7. Create a pull request on this repository from your forked project. We will review and discuss
   your code and merge it.