Building trainable taggers in a web-based, UIMA-supported NLP workbench

Argo is a web-based NLP and text mining workbench with a convenient graphical user interface for designing and executing processing workflows of various complexity. The workbench is intended for specialists and nontechnical audiences alike, and provides the ever expanding library of analytics compliant with the Unstructured Information Management Architecture, a widely adopted interoperability framework. We explore the flexibility of this framework by demonstrating workflows involving three processing components capable of performing self-contained machine learning-based tagging. The three components are responsible for the three distinct tasks of 1) generating observations or features, 2) training a statistical model based on the generated features, and 3) tagging unlabelled data with the model. The learning and tagging components are based on an implementation of conditional random fields (CRF); whereas the feature generation component is an analytic capable of extending basic token information to a comprehensive set of features. Users define the features of their choice directly from Argo’s graphical interface, without resorting to programming (a commonly used approach to feature engineering). The experimental results performed on two tagging tasks, chunking and named entity recognition, showed that a tagger with a generic set of features built in Argo is capable of competing with taskspecific solutions.

Clinical practice knowledge acquisition and interrogation using natural language: aquisição e interrogação de conhecimento de prática clínica usando linguagem natural

Os conceitos científicos, metodologias e ferramentas no sub-dominio da Representação de Conhecimento da área da Inteligência Artificial Aplicada têm sofrido avanços muito significativos nos anos recentes. A utilização de Ontologias como conceptualizações de domínios é agora suficientemente poderosa para aspirar ao raciocínio computacional sobre realidades complexas. Uma das tarefas científica e tecnicamente mais desafiante é prestação de cuidados pelos profissionais de saúde na especialidade cardiovascular. Um domínio de tal forma complexo pode beneficiar largamente da possibilidade de ajudas ao raciocínio clínico que estão neste momento a beira de ficarem disponíveis. Investigamos no sentido de desenvolver uma infraestrutura sólida e completa para a representação de conhecimento na prática clínica bem como os processes associados para adquirir o conhecimento a partir de textos clínicos e raciocinar automaticamente sobre esse conhecimento; ABSTRACT: The scientific concepts, methodologies and tools in the Knowledge Representation (KR) subdomain of applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) came a long way with enormous strides in recent years. The usage of domain conceptualizations that are Ontologies is now powerful enough to aim at computable reasoning over complex realities. One of the most challenging scientific and technical human endeavors is the daily Clinical Practice (CP) of Cardiovascular (C V) specialty healthcare providers. Such a complex domain can benefit largely from the possibility of clinical reasoning aids that are now at the edge of being available. We research into al complete end-to-end solid ontological infrastructure for CP knowledge representation as well as the associated processes to automatically acquire knowledge from clinical texts and reason over it

Aquisição e Interrogação de Conhecimento de Prática Clínica usando Linguagem Natural

The scientific concepts, methodologies and tools in the Knowledge Representation (KR) sub- domain of applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) came a long way with enormous strides in recent years. The usage of domain conceptualizations that are Ontologies is now powerful enough to aim at computable reasoning over complex realities. One of the most challenging scientific and technical human endeavors is the daily Clinical Prac- tice (CP) of Cardiovascular (CV) specialty healthcare providers. Such a complex domain can benefit largely from the possibility of clinical reasoning aids that are now at the edge of being available. We research into a complete end-to-end solid ontological infrastructure for CP knowledge represen- tation as well as the associated processes to automatically acquire knowledge from clinical texts and reason over it

Mining the Medical and Patent Literature to Support Healthcare and Pharmacovigilance

Recent advancements in healthcare practices and the increasing use of information technology in the medical domain has lead to the rapid generation of free-text data in forms of scientific articles, e-health records, patents, and document inventories. This has urged the development of sophisticated information retrieval and information extraction technologies. A fundamental requirement for the automatic processing of biomedical text is the identification of information carrying units such as the concepts or named entities. In this context, this work focuses on the identification of medical disorders (such as diseases and adverse effects) which denote an important category of concepts in the medical text. Two methodologies were investigated in this regard and they are dictionary-based and machine learning-based approaches. Futhermore, the capabilities of the concept recognition techniques were systematically exploited to build a semantic search platform for the retrieval of e-health records and patents. The system facilitates conventional text search as well as semantic and ontological searches. Performance of the adapted retrieval platform for e-health records and patents was evaluated within open assessment challenges (i.e. TRECMED and TRECCHEM respectively) wherein the system was best rated in comparison to several other competing information retrieval platforms. Finally, from the medico-pharma perspective, a strategy for the identification of adverse drug events from medical case reports was developed. Qualitative evaluation as well as an expert validation of the developed system's performance showed robust results. In conclusion, this thesis presents approaches for efficient information retrieval and information extraction from various biomedical literature sources in the support of healthcare and pharmacovigilance. The applied strategies have potential to enhance the literature-searches performed by biomedical, healthcare, and patent professionals. The applied strategies have potential to enhance the literature-searches performed by biomedical, healthcare, and patent professionals. This can promote the literature-based knowledge discovery, improve the safety and effectiveness of medical practices, and drive the research and development in medical and healthcare arena