Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Linguamatics is currently seeking a talented post graduate with experience of natural language processing to work on leading edge text mining products. You will be responsible for developing and maintaining resources for domain specific adaptation of real-time semantic search software based on Natural Language Processing. Working closely with application scientists and the development team, you will ensure that the combination of software and resources satisfies customer requirements. This will include developing linguistic patterns, and programs to transform domain specific terminologies into common formats and keep them up-to-date. You will be working on life science applications, and some knowledge of the Pharmaceutical or Healthcare industry would be useful.In addition to resource and application development, you will be expected to contribute to ongoing UK or EU funded research projects as part of the research and resource development team. You will have strong communication ski...

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/9/82 Abstract Background The performance of different programming languages has previously been benchmarked using abstract mathematical algorithms, but not using standard bioinformatics algorithms. We compared the memory usage and speed of execution for three standard bioinformatics methods, implemented in programs using one of six different programming languages. Programs for the Sellers algorithm, the Neighbor-Joining tree construction algorithm and an algorithm for parsing BLAST file outputs were implemented in C, C++, C#, Java, Perl and Python. Results Implementations in C and C++ were fastest and used the least memory. Programs in these languages generally contained more lines of code. Java and C# appeared to be a compromise between the flexibility of Perl and Python and the fast performance of C and C++. The relative performance of the tested languages d...