Extraction of semantic biomedical relations from text using conditional random fields

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The increasing amount of published literature in biomedicine represents an immense source of knowledge, which can only efficiently be accessed by a new generation of automated information extraction tools. Named entity recognition of well-defined objects, such as genes or proteins, has achieved a sufficient level of maturity such that it can form the basis for the next step: the extraction of relations that exist between the recognized entities. Whereas most early work focused on the mere detection of relations, the classification of the type of relation is also of great importance and this is the focus of this work. In this paper we describe an approach that extracts both the existence of a relation and its type. Our work is based on Conditional Random Fields, which have been applied with much success to the task of named entity recognition.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We benchmark our approach on two different tasks. The first task is the identification of semantic relations between diseases and treatments. The available data set consists of manually annotated PubMed abstracts. The second task is the identification of relations between genes and diseases from a set of concise phrases, so-called GeneRIF (Gene Reference Into Function) phrases. In our experimental setting, we do not assume that the entities are given, as is often the case in previous relation extraction work. Rather the extraction of the entities is solved as a subproblem. Compared with other state-of-the-art approaches, we achieve very competitive results on both data sets. To demonstrate the scalability of our solution, we apply our approach to the complete human GeneRIF database. The resulting gene-disease network contains 34758 semantic associations between 4939 genes and 1745 diseases. The gene-disease network is publicly available as a machine-readable RDF graph.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We extend the framework of Conditional Random Fields towards the annotation of semantic relations from text and apply it to the biomedical domain. Our approach is based on a rich set of textual features and achieves a performance that is competitive to leading approaches. The model is quite general and can be extended to handle arbitrary biological entities and relation types. The resulting gene-disease network shows that the GeneRIF database provides a rich knowledge source for text mining. Current work is focused on improving the accuracy of detection of entities as well as entity boundaries, which will also greatly improve the relation extraction performance.</p

Measuring prediction capacity of individual verbs for the identification of protein interactions

AbstractMotivation: The identification of events such as protein–protein interactions (PPIs) from the scientific literature is a complex task. One of the reasons is that there is no formal syntax to denote such relations in the scientific literature. Nonetheless, it is important to understand such relational event representations to improve information extraction solutions (e.g., for gene regulatory events).In this study, we analyze publicly available protein interaction corpora (AIMed, BioInfer, BioCreAtIve II) to determine the scope of verbs used to denote protein interactions and to measure their predictive capacity for the identification of PPI events. Our analysis is based on syntactical language patterns. This restriction has the advantage that the verb mention is used as the independent variable in the experiments enabling comparability of results in the usage of the verbs. The initial selection of verbs has been generated from a systematic analysis of the scientific literature and existing corpora for PPIs.We distinguish modifying interactions (MIs) such as posttranslational modifications (PTMs) from non-modifying interactions (NMIs) and assumed that MIs have a higher predictive capacity due to stronger scientific evidence proving the interaction. We found that MIs are less frequent in the corpus but can be extracted at the same precision levels as PPIs. A significant portion of correct PPI reportings in the BioCreAtIve II corpus use the verb “associate”, which semantically does not prove a relation.The performance of every monitored verb is listed and allows the selection of specific verbs to improve the performance of PPI extraction solutions. Programmatic access to the text processing modules is available online (www.ebi.ac.uk/webservices/whatizit/info.jsf) and the full analysis of Medline abstracts will be made through the Web pages of the Rebholz group

Biomedical name recognition: A machine learning approach

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

TechMiner: Extracting Technologies from Academic Publications

In recent years we have seen the emergence of a variety of scholarly datasets. Typically these capture ‘standard’ scholarly entities and their connections, such as authors, affiliations, venues, publications, citations, and others. However, as the repositories grow and the technology improves, researchers are adding new entities to these repositories to develop a richer model of the scholarly domain. In this paper, we introduce TechMiner, a new approach, which combines NLP, machine learning and semantic technologies, for mining technologies from research publications and generating an OWL ontology describing their relationships with other research entities. The resulting knowledge base can support a number of tasks, such as: richer semantic search, which can exploit the technology dimension to support better retrieval of publications; richer expert search; monitoring the emergence and impact of new technologies, both within and across scientific fields; studying the scholarly dynamics associated with the emergence of new technologies; and others. TechMiner was evaluated on a manually annotated gold standard and the results indicate that it significantly outperforms alternative NLP approaches and that its semantic features improve performance significantly with respect to both recall and precision

Biomedical Named Entity Recognition: A Review

Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (BNER) is the task of identifying biomedical instances such as chemical compounds, genes, proteins, viruses, disorders, DNAs and RNAs. The key challenge behind BNER lies on the methods that would be used for extracting such entities. Most of the methods used for BNER were relying on Supervised Machine Learning (SML) techniques. In SML techniques, the features play an essential role in terms of improving the effectiveness of the recognition process. Features can be identified as a set of discriminating and distinguishing characteristics that have the ability to indicate the occurrence of an entity. In this manner, the features should be able to generalize which means to discriminate the entities correctly even on new and unseen samples. Several studies have tackled the role of feature in terms of identifying named entities. However, with the surge of biomedical researches, there is a vital demand to explore biomedical features. This paper aims to accommodate a review study on the features that could be used for BNER in which various types of features will be examined including morphological features, dictionary-based features, lexical features and distance-based features

A network approach for managing and processing big cancer data in clouds

Translational cancer research requires integrative analysis of multiple levels of big cancer data to identify and treat cancer. In order to address the issues that data is decentralised, growing and continually being updated, and the content living or archiving on different information sources partially overlaps creating redundancies as well as contradictions and inconsistencies, we develop a data network model and technology for constructing and managing big cancer data. To support our data network approach for data process and analysis, we employ a semantic content network approach and adopt the CELAR cloud platform. The prototype implementation shows that the CELAR cloud can satisfy the on-demanding needs of various data resources for management and process of big cancer data