Files and code for English dictionaries, gold and silver standard corpora for biomedical natural language processing related to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19

<p><span lang="EN-GB">Automated information extraction with natural language processing (NLP) tools is required to gain systematic insights from the large number of COVID-19 publications, reports and social media posts, which far exceed human processing capabilities.&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span lang="EN-GB">Here we present an NLP toolbox comprising COVID-19-related dictionaries and annotated corpora in English as well as useful code and workflows for their update and use. The dictionaries contain terms referring to the COVID-19 disease, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, its variants and common mutations, respectively. They were used together with the EasyNER NLP tool to extract and annotate all 764&nbsp;398 abstracts in the CORD-19 dataset, creating a very large silver standard corpus (named Lund-Annotated-CORD-19 corpus). This was complemented with a small gold standard corpus consisting of PubMed abstracts manually annotated for key entity classes such as disease, virus, symptom, protein/gene, cell type, chemical and species terms. </span></p> <p><span lang="EN-GB">The toolbox can support various text analysis tasks related to COVID-19 such as named entity recognition and co-mention analysis. A preliminary version of the toolbox, which was released early in the pandemic, was</span><span lang="EN-GB"> for example already used to create a COVID-19 knowledge graph and study the evolution and variation of COVID-19-related terminology. In addition, the toolbox can be applied in the development of other NLP tools, for example to train and evaluate large language models.</span></p> <p><span lang="EN-GB">When using the toolbox, please cite this record and the associated article.</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>