There are lexical, syntactic, semantic and discourse variations amongst the languages used in various biomedical subdomains. It is important to recognise such differences and understand that biomedical tools that work well on some subdomains may not work as well on others. We report here on the semantic variations that occur in the sublanguages of two biomedical subdomains, . cell biology and pharmacology, at the level of named entity information. By building a classifier using ratios of named entities as features, we show that named entity information can discriminate between documents from each subdomain. .
