MEDLINE Cognition (SemanticMEDLINE.com)
[EDIT: Sandy Swanson notes that "It appears that foreign-language articles are not included in Semantic Medline." I guess that isn't surprising. After all, its NLP has to be language-specific and there are more articles in English than any other language.]

I knew that an interface for MEDLINE using Natural Language Processing was being developed at Lister Hill, and PubFocus has been called “semantic MEDLINE” too, but I heard a couple of days ago about a tool from Cognition Technologies called (appropriately enough) SemanticMEDLINE.
I’m going to need to play with it a bit more before having any idea if it’ll be useful to me, but it is interesting.
I searched for “Are probiotics an effective therapy for Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis?” and got the following results:

The most interesting part of this is how the panel on the right has drop-down menus for the terms it recognizes, allowing the user to make sure the search is using the correct terms/definitions.

What I don’t understand yet is how these definitions are utilized in performing the PubMed/MEDLINE search.
Be sure to check out the HELP page for notes on the way it uses AND, OR, WITH, and WITHIN operators, the way it uses quotation marks, and how to work with capitalization.
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August 5th, 2008 at 10:39 am
[...] Thanks to David Rothman for the pointer – [...]
August 10th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
[...] There’s more. Allan’s Library points out tools for Making Academic Web Sites Better, and David Rothman introduces us to SemanticMEDLINE, a new tool from Cognition Technologies. [...]