Text mining meets community curation: a newly designed curation platform to improve author experience and participation at WormBase

Biological knowledgebases rely on expert biocuration of the research literature to maintain up-to-date collections of data organized in machine-readable form. To enter information into knowledgebases, curators need to follow three steps: (i) identify papers containing relevant data, a process called triaging; (ii) recognize named entities; and (iii) extract and curate data in accordance with the underlying data models. WormBase (WB), the authoritative repository for research data on Caenorhabditis elegans and other nematodes, uses text mining (TM) to semi-automate its curation pipeline. In addition, WB engages its community, via an Author First Pass (AFP) system, to help recognize entities and classify data types in their recently published papers. In this paper, we present a new WB AFP system that combines TM and AFP into a single application to enhance community curation. The system employs string-searching algorithms and statistical methods (e.g. support vector machines (SVMs)) to extract biological entities and classify data types, and it presents the results to authors in a web form where they validate the extracted information, rather than enter it de novo as the previous form required. With this new system, we lessen the burden for authors, while at the same time receive valuable feedback on the performance of our TM tools. The new user interface also links out to specific structured data submission forms, e.g. for phenotype or expression pattern data, giving the authors the opportunity to contribute a more detailed curation that can be incorporated into WB with minimal curator review. Our approach is generalizable and could be applied to additional knowledgebases that would like to engage their user community in assisting with the curation. In the five months succeeding the launch of the new system, the response rate has been comparable with that of the previous AFP version, but the quality and quantity of the data received has greatly improved

BioNLP Shared Task 2011 - Bacteria Gene Interactions and Renaming

Document Type : Proceedings Paper Conference Date : JUN 23-24, 2011 Conference Location : Portland, ORInternational audienceWe present two related tasks of the BioNLP Shared Tasks 2011: Bacteria Gene Renaming (Rename) and Bacteria Gene Interactions (GI). We detail the objectives, the corpus specification, the evaluation metrics, and we summarize the participants' results. Both issued from PubMed scientific literature abstracts, the Rename task aims at extracting gene name synonyms, and the GI task aims at extracting genic interaction events, mainly about gene transcriptional regulations in bacteria

BioNLP Shared Task - The Bacteria Track

Background: We present the BioNLP 2011 Shared Task Bacteria Track, the first Information Extraction challenge entirely dedicated to bacteria. It includes three tasks that cover different levels of biological knowledge. The Bacteria Gene Renaming supporting task is aimed at extracting gene renaming and gene name synonymy in PubMed abstracts. The Bacteria Gene Interaction is a gene/protein interaction extraction task from individual sentences. The interactions have been categorized into ten different sub-types, thus giving a detailed account of genetic regulations at the molecular level. Finally, the Bacteria Biotopes task focuses on the localization and environment of bacteria mentioned in textbook articles. We describe the process of creation for the three corpora, including document acquisition and manual annotation, as well as the metrics used to evaluate the participants' submissions. Results: Three teams submitted to the Bacteria Gene Renaming task; the best team achieved an F-score of 87%. For the Bacteria Gene Interaction task, the only participant's score had reached a global F-score of 77%, although the system efficiency varies significantly from one sub-type to another. Three teams submitted to the Bacteria Biotopes task with very different approaches; the best team achieved an F-score of 45%. However, the detailed study of the participating systems efficiency reveals the strengths and weaknesses of each participating system. Conclusions: The three tasks of the Bacteria Track offer participants a chance to address a wide range of issues in Information Extraction, including entity recognition, semantic typing and coreference resolution. We found commond trends in the most efficient systems: the systematic use of syntactic dependencies and machine learning. Nevertheless, the originality of the Bacteria Biotopes task encouraged the use of interesting novel methods and techniques, such as term compositionality, scopes wider than the sentence

Do peers see more in a paper than its authors?

Recent years have shown a gradual shift in the content of biomedical publications that is freely accessible, from titles and abstracts to full text. This has enabled new forms of automatic text analysis and has given rise to some interesting questions: How informative is the abstract compared to the full-text? What important information in the full-text is not present in the abstract? What should a good summary contain that is not already in the abstract? Do authors and peers see an article differently? We answer these questions by comparing the information content of the abstract to that in citances-sentences containing citations to that article. We contrast the important points of an article as judged by its authors versus as seen by peers. Focusing on the area of molecular interactions, we perform manual and automatic analysis, and we find that the set of all citances to a target article not only covers most information (entities, functions, experimental methods, and other biological concepts) found in its abstract, but also contains 20% more concepts. We further present a detailed summary of the differences across information types, and we examine the effects other citations and time have on the content of citances

The structural and content aspects of abstracts versus bodies of full text journal articles are different

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>An increase in work on the full text of journal articles and the growth of PubMedCentral have the opportunity to create a major paradigm shift in how biomedical text mining is done. However, until now there has been no comprehensive characterization of how the bodies of full text journal articles differ from the abstracts that until now have been the subject of most biomedical text mining research.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We examined the structural and linguistic aspects of abstracts and bodies of full text articles, the performance of text mining tools on both, and the distribution of a variety of semantic classes of named entities between them. We found marked structural differences, with longer sentences in the article bodies and much heavier use of parenthesized material in the bodies than in the abstracts. We found content differences with respect to linguistic features. Three out of four of the linguistic features that we examined were statistically significantly differently distributed between the two genres. We also found content differences with respect to the distribution of semantic features. There were significantly different densities per thousand words for three out of four semantic classes, and clear differences in the extent to which they appeared in the two genres. With respect to the performance of text mining tools, we found that a mutation finder performed equally well in both genres, but that a wide variety of gene mention systems performed much worse on article bodies than they did on abstracts. POS tagging was also more accurate in abstracts than in article bodies.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Aspects of structure and content differ markedly between article abstracts and article bodies. A number of these differences may pose problems as the text mining field moves more into the area of processing full-text articles. However, these differences also present a number of opportunities for the extraction of data types, particularly that found in parenthesized text, that is present in article bodies but not in article abstracts.</p

Text Mining Of Variant-Genotype-Phenotype Associations From Biomedical Literature

In spite of the efforts in developing and maintaining accurate variant databases, a large number of disease-associated variants are still hidden in the biomedical literature. Curation of the biomedical literature in an effort to extract this information is a challenging task due to i) the complexity of natural language processing, ii) inconsistent use of standard recommendations for variant description, and iii) the lack of clarity and consistency in describing the variant-genotype-phenotype associations in the biomedical literature. In this article, we employ text mining and word cloud analysis techniques to address these challenges. The proposed framework extracts the variant-gene-disease associations from the full-length biomedical literature and designs an evidence-based variant-driven gene panel for a given condition. We validate the identified genes by showing their diagnostic abilities to predict the patients’ clinical outcomes on several independent validation cohorts. As representative examples, we present our results for acute myeloid leukemia (AML), breast cancer, and prostate cancer. We compare these panels with other variant-driven gene panels obtained from Clinvar, Mastermind, and others from literature, as well as with a panel identified with a classical differentially expressed genes (DEGs) approach. The results show that the panels obtained by the proposed framework yield better results than the other gene panels currently available in the literature

New approach for Arabic named entity recognition on social media based on feature selection using genetic algorithm

Many features can be extracted from the massive volume of data in different types that are available nowadays on social media. The growing demand for multimedia applications was an essential factor in this regard, particularly in the case of text data. Often, using the full feature set for each of these activities can be time-consuming and can also negatively impact performance. It is challenging to find a subset of features that are useful for a given task due to a large number of features. In this paper, we employed a feature selection approach using the genetic algorithm to identify the optimized feature set. Afterward, the best combination of the optimal feature set is used to identify and classify the Arabic named entities (NEs) based on support vector. Experimental results show that our system reaches a state-of-the-art performance of the Arab NER on social media and significantly outperforms the previous systems