  The terminology used in Biomedicine shows lexical peculiarities that have
required the elaboration of terminological resources and information retrieval
systems with specific functionalities. The main characteristics are the high
rates of synonymy and homonymy, due to phenomena such as the proliferation of
polysemic acronyms and their interaction with common language. Information
retrieval systems in the biomedical domain use techniques oriented to the
treatment of these lexical peculiarities. In this paper we review some of the
techniques used in this domain, such as the application of Natural Language
Processing (BioNLP), the incorporation of lexical-semantic resources, and the
application of Named Entity Recognition (BioNER). Finally, we present the
evaluation methods adopted to assess the suitability of these techniques for
retrieving biomedical resources.
