Large Scale Application of Neural Network Based Semantic Role Labeling for Automated Relation Extraction from Biomedical Texts

To reduce the increasing amount of time spent on literature search in the life sciences, several methods for automated knowledge extraction have been developed. Co-occurrence based approaches can deal with large text corpora like MEDLINE in an acceptable time but are not able to extract any specific type of semantic relation. Semantic relation extraction methods based on syntax trees, on the other hand, are computationally expensive and the interpretation of the generated trees is difficult. Several natural language processing (NLP) approaches for the biomedical domain exist focusing specifically on the detection of a limited set of relation types. For systems biology, generic approaches for the detection of a multitude of relation types which in addition are able to process large text corpora are needed but the number of systems meeting both requirements is very limited. We introduce the use of SENNA (“Semantic Extraction using a Neural Network Architecture”), a fast and accurate neural network based Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) program, for the large scale extraction of semantic relations from the biomedical literature. A comparison of processing times of SENNA and other SRL systems or syntactical parsers used in the biomedical domain revealed that SENNA is the fastest Proposition Bank (PropBank) conforming SRL program currently available. 89 million biomedical sentences were tagged with SENNA on a 100 node cluster within three days. The accuracy of the presented relation extraction approach was evaluated on two test sets of annotated sentences resulting in precision/recall values of 0.71/0.43. We show that the accuracy as well as processing speed of the proposed semantic relation extraction approach is sufficient for its large scale application on biomedical text. The proposed approach is highly generalizable regarding the supported relation types and appears to be especially suited for general-purpose, broad-scale text mining systems. The presented approach bridges the gap between fast, cooccurrence-based approaches lacking semantic relations and highly specialized and computationally demanding NLP approaches

Mining clinical attributes of genomic variants through assisted literature curation in Egas

The veritable deluge of biological data over recent years has led to the establishment of a considerable number of knowledge resources that compile curated information extracted from the literature and store it in structured form, facilitating its use and exploitation. In this article, we focus on the curation of inherited genetic variants and associated clinical attributes, such as zygosity, penetrance or inheritance mode, and describe the use of Egas for this task. Egas is a web-based platform for text-mining assisted literature curation that focuses on usability through modern design solutions and simple user interactions. Egas offers a flexible and customizable tool that allows defining the concept types and relations of interest for a given annotation task, as well as the ontologies used for normalizing each concept type. Further, annotations may be performed on raw documents or on the results of automated concept identification and relation extraction tools. Users can inspect, correct or remove automatic text-mining results, manually add new annotations, and export the results to standard formats. Egas is compatible with the most recent versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari and is available for use at https://demo.bmd-software.com/egas/

Biomedical Event Extraction with Machine Learning

Biomedical natural language processing (BioNLP) is a subfield of natural language processing, an area of computational linguistics concerned with developing programs that work with natural language: written texts and speech. Biomedical relation extraction concerns the detection of semantic relations such as protein-protein interactions (PPI) from scientific texts. The aim is to enhance information retrieval by detecting relations between concepts, not just individual concepts as with a keyword search. In recent years, events have been proposed as a more detailed alternative for simple pairwise PPI relations. Events provide a systematic, structural representation for annotating the content of natural language texts. Events are characterized by annotated trigger words, directed and typed arguments and the ability to nest other events. For example, the sentence “Protein A causes protein B to bind protein C” can be annotated with the nested event structure CAUSE(A, BIND(B, C)). Converted to such formal representations, the information of natural language texts can be used by computational applications. Biomedical event annotations were introduced by the BioInfer and GENIA corpora, and event extraction was popularized by the BioNLP'09 Shared Task on Event Extraction. In this thesis we present a method for automated event extraction, implemented as the Turku Event Extraction System (TEES). A unified graph format is defined for representing event annotations and the problem of extracting complex event structures is decomposed into a number of independent classification tasks. These classification tasks are solved using SVM and RLS classifiers, utilizing rich feature representations built from full dependency parsing. Building on earlier work on pairwise relation extraction and using a generalized graph representation, the resulting TEES system is capable of detecting binary relations as well as complex event structures. We show that this event extraction system has good performance, reaching the first place in the BioNLP'09 Shared Task on Event Extraction. Subsequently, TEES has achieved several first ranks in the BioNLP'11 and BioNLP'13 Shared Tasks, as well as shown competitive performance in the binary relation Drug-Drug Interaction Extraction 2011 and 2013 shared tasks. The Turku Event Extraction System is published as a freely available open-source project, documenting the research in detail as well as making the method available for practical applications. In particular, in this thesis we describe the application of the event extraction method to PubMed-scale text mining, showing how the developed approach not only shows good performance, but is generalizable and applicable to large-scale real-world text mining projects. Finally, we discuss related literature, summarize the contributions of the work and present some thoughts on future directions for biomedical event extraction. This thesis includes and builds on six original research publications. The first of these introduces the analysis of dependency parses that leads to development of TEES. The entries in the three BioNLP Shared Tasks, as well as in the DDIExtraction 2011 task are covered in four publications, and the sixth one demonstrates the application of the system to PubMed-scale text mining.Siirretty Doriast

Large-scale protein-protein post-translational modification extraction with distant supervision and confidence calibrated BioBERT

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are critical to normal cellular function and are related to many disease pathways. A range of protein functions are mediated and regulated by protein interactions through post-translational modifications (PTM). However, only 4% of PPIs are annotated with PTMs in biological knowledge databases such as IntAct, mainly performed through manual curation, which is neither time- nor cost-effective. Here we aim to facilitate annotation by extracting PPIs along with their pairwise PTM from the literature by using distantly supervised training data using deep learning to aid human curation. Method We use the IntAct PPI database to create a distant supervised dataset annotated with interacting protein pairs, their corresponding PTM type, and associated abstracts from the PubMed database. We train an ensemble of BioBERT models-dubbed PPI-BioBERT-x10-to improve confidence calibration. We extend the use of ensemble average confidence approach with confidence variation to counteract the effects of class imbalance to extract high confidence predictions. Results and conclusion The PPI-BioBERT-x10 model evaluated on the test set resulted in a modest F1-micro 41.3 (P =5 8.1, R = 32.1). However, by combining high confidence and low variation to identify high quality predictions, tuning the predictions for precision, we retained 19% of the test predictions with 100% precision. We evaluated PPI-BioBERT-x10 on 18 million PubMed abstracts and extracted 1.6 million (546507 unique PTM-PPI triplets) PTM-PPI predictions, and filter [Formula: see text] (4584 unique) high confidence predictions. Of the 5700, human evaluation on a small randomly sampled subset shows that the precision drops to 33.7% despite confidence calibration and highlights the challenges of generalisability beyond the test set even with confidence calibration. We circumvent the problem by only including predictions associated with multiple papers, improving the precision to 58.8%. In this work, we highlight the benefits and challenges of deep learning-based text mining in practice, and the need for increased emphasis on confidence calibration to facilitate human curation efforts.Aparna Elangovan, Yuan Li, Douglas E. V. Pires, Melissa J. Davis, and Karin Verspoo

Band gap information extraction from materials science literature – a pilot study

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a preliminary work on extracting band gap information of materials from academic papers. With increasing demand for renewable energy, band gap information will help material scientists design and implement novel photovoltaic (PV) cells. Design/methodology/approach The authors collected 1.44 million titles and abstracts of scholarly articles related to materials science, and then filtered the collection to 11,939 articles that potentially contain relevant information about materials and their band gap values. ChemDataExtractor was extended to extract information about PV materials and their band gap information. Evaluation was performed on randomly sampled information records of 415 papers. Findings The findings of this study show that the current system is able to correctly extract information for 51.32% articles, with partially correct extraction for 36.62% articles and incorrect for 12.04%. The authors have also identified the errors belonging to three main categories pertaining to chemical entity identification, band gap information and interdependency resolution. Future work will focus on addressing these errors to improve the performance of the system. Originality/value The authors did not find any literature to date on band gap information extraction from academic text using automated methods. This work is unique and original. Band gap information is of importance to materials scientists in applications such as solar cells, light emitting diodes and laser diodes

Biomedical Event Extraction with Machine Learning

Biomedical natural language processing (BioNLP) is a subfield of natural language processing, an area of computational linguistics concerned with developing programs that work with natural language: written texts and speech. Biomedical relation extraction concerns the detection of semantic relations such as protein--protein interactions (PPI) from scientific texts. The aim is to enhance information retrieval by detecting relations between concepts, not just individual concepts as with a keyword search. In recent years, events have been proposed as a more detailed alternative for simple pairwise PPI relations. Events provide a systematic, structural representation for annotating the content of natural language texts. Events are characterized by annotated trigger words, directed and typed arguments and the ability to nest other events. For example, the sentence ``Protein A causes protein B to bind protein C&#39;&#39; can be annotated with the nested event structure CAUSE(A, BIND(B, C)). Converted to such formal representations, the information of natural language texts can be used by computational applications. Biomedical event annotations were introduced by the BioInfer and GENIA corpora, and event extraction was popularized by the BioNLP&#39;09 Shared Task on Event Extraction. In this thesis we present a method for automated event extraction, implemented as the Turku Event Extraction System (TEES). A unified graph format is defined for representing event annotations and the problem of extracting complex event structures is decomposed into a number of independent classification tasks. These classification tasks are solved using SVM and RLS classifiers, utilizing rich feature representations built from full dependency parsing.&nbsp; Building on earlier work on pairwise relation extraction and using a generalized graph representation, the resulting TEES system is capable of detecting binary relations as well as complex event structures. We show that this event extraction system has good performance, reaching the first place in the BioNLP&#39;09 Shared Task on Event Extraction. Subsequently, TEES has achieved several first ranks in the BioNLP&#39;11 and BioNLP&#39;13 Shared Tasks, as well as shown competitive performance in the binary relation Drug-Drug Interaction Extraction 2011 and 2013 shared tasks. The Turku Event Extraction System is published as a freely available open-source project, documenting the research in detail as well as making the method available for practical applications. In particular, in this thesis we describe the application of the event extraction method to PubMed-scale text mining, showing how the developed approach not only shows good performance, but is generalizable and applicable to large-scale real-world text mining projects. Finally, we discuss related literature, summarize the contributions of the work and present some thoughts on future directions for biomedical event extraction. This thesis includes and builds on six original research publications. The first of these introduces the analysis of dependency parses that leads to development of TEES. The entries in the three BioNLP Shared Tasks, as well as in the DDIExtraction 2011 task are covered in four publications, and the sixth one demonstrates the application of the system to PubMed-scale text mining.</p

Text Mining for Pathway Curation

Biolog:innen untersuchen häufig Pathways, Netzwerke von Interaktionen zwischen Proteinen und Genen mit einer spezifischen Funktion. Neue Erkenntnisse über Pathways werden in der Regel zunächst in Publikationen veröffentlicht und dann in strukturierter Form in Lehrbüchern, Datenbanken oder mathematischen Modellen weitergegeben. Deren Kuratierung kann jedoch aufgrund der hohen Anzahl von Publikationen sehr aufwendig sein. In dieser Arbeit untersuchen wir wie Text Mining Methoden die Kuratierung unterstützen können. Wir stellen PEDL vor, ein Machine-Learning-Modell zur Extraktion von Protein-Protein-Assoziationen (PPAs) aus biomedizinischen Texten. PEDL verwendet Distant Supervision und vortrainierte Sprachmodelle, um eine höhere Genauigkeit als vergleichbare Methoden zu erreichen. Eine Evaluation durch Expert:innen bestätigt die Nützlichkeit von PEDLs für Pathway-Kurator:innen. Außerdem stellen wir PEDL+ vor, ein Kommandozeilen-Tool, mit dem auch Nicht-Expert:innen PPAs effizient extrahieren können. Drei Kurator:innen bewerten 55,6 % bis 79,6 % der von PEDL+ gefundenen PPAs als nützlich für ihre Arbeit. Die große Anzahl von PPAs, die durch Text Mining identifiziert werden, kann für Forscher:innen überwältigend sein. Um hier Abhilfe zu schaffen, stellen wir PathComplete vor, ein Modell, das nützliche Erweiterungen eines Pathways vorschlägt. Es ist die erste Pathway-Extension-Methode, die auf überwachtem maschinellen Lernen basiert. Unsere Experimente zeigen, dass PathComplete wesentlich genauer ist als existierende Methoden. Schließlich schlagen wir eine Methode vor, um Pathways mit komplexen Ereignisstrukturen zu erweitern. Hier übertrifft unsere neue Methode zur konditionalen Graphenmodifikation die derzeit beste Methode um 13-24% Genauigkeit in drei Benchmarks. Insgesamt zeigen unsere Ergebnisse, dass Deep Learning basierte Informationsextraktion eine vielversprechende Grundlage für die Unterstützung von Pathway-Kurator:innen ist.Biological knowledge often involves understanding the interactions between molecules, such as proteins and genes, that form functional networks called pathways. New knowledge about pathways is typically communicated through publications and later condensed into structured formats such as textbooks, pathway databases or mathematical models. However, curating updated pathway models can be labour-intensive due to the growing volume of publications. This thesis investigates text mining methods to support pathway curation. We present PEDL (Protein-Protein-Association Extraction with Deep Language Models), a machine learning model designed to extract protein-protein associations (PPAs) from biomedical text. PEDL uses distant supervision and pre-trained language models to achieve higher accuracy than the state of the art. An expert evaluation confirms its usefulness for pathway curators. We also present PEDL+, a command-line tool that allows non-expert users to efficiently extract PPAs. When applied to pathway curation tasks, 55.6% to 79.6% of PEDL+ extractions were found useful by curators. The large number of PPAs identified by text mining can be overwhelming for researchers. To help, we present PathComplete, a model that suggests potential extensions to a pathway. It is the first method based on supervised machine learning for this task, using transfer learning from pathway databases. Our evaluations show that PathComplete significantly outperforms existing methods. Finally, we generalise pathway extension from PPAs to more realistic complex events. Here, our novel method for conditional graph modification outperforms the current best by 13-24% accuracy on three benchmarks. We also present a new dataset for event-based pathway extension. Overall, our results show that deep learning-based information extraction is a promising basis for supporting pathway curators

Unmasking The Language Of Science Through Textual Analyses On Biomedical Preprints And Published Papers

Scientific communication is essential for science as it enables the field to grow. This task is often accomplished through a written form such as preprints and published papers. We can obtain a high-level understanding of science and how scientific trends adapt over time by analyzing these resources. This thesis focuses on conducting multiple analyses using biomedical preprints and published papers. In Chapter 2, we explore the language contained within preprints and examine how this language changes due to the peer-review process. We find that token differences between published papers and preprints are stylistically based, suggesting that peer-review results in modest textual changes. We also discovered that preprints are eventually published and adopted quickly within the life science community. Chapter 3 investigates how biomedical terms and tokens change their meaning and usage through time. We show that multiple machine learning models can correct for the latent variation contained within the biomedical text. Also, we provide the scientific community with a listing of over 43,000 potential change points. Tokens with notable changepoints such as “sars” and “cas9” appear within our listing, providing some validation for our approach. In Chapter 4, we use the weak supervision paradigm to examine the possibility of speeding up the labeling function generation process for multiple biomedical relationship types. We found that the language used to describe a biomedical relationship is often distinct, leading to a modest performance in terms of transferability. An exception to this trend is Compound-binds-Gene and Gene-interacts-Gene relationship types

Ontology Enrichment from Free-text Clinical Documents: A Comparison of Alternative Approaches

While the biomedical informatics community widely acknowledges the utility of domain ontologies, there remain many barriers to their effective use. One important requirement of domain ontologies is that they achieve a high degree of coverage of the domain concepts and concept relationships. However, the development of these ontologies is typically a manual, time-consuming, and often error-prone process. Limited resources result in missing concepts and relationships, as well as difficulty in updating the ontology as domain knowledge changes. Methodologies developed in the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Extraction (IE), Information Retrieval (IR), and Machine Learning (ML) provide techniques for automating the enrichment of ontology from free-text documents. In this dissertation, I extended these methodologies into biomedical ontology development. First, I reviewed existing methodologies and systems developed in the fields of NLP, IR, and IE, and discussed how existing methods can benefit the development of biomedical ontologies. This previously unconducted review was published in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics. Second, I compared the effectiveness of three methods from two different approaches, the symbolic (the Hearst method) and the statistical (the Church and Lin methods), using clinical free-text documents. Third, I developed a methodological framework for Ontology Learning (OL) evaluation and comparison. This framework permits evaluation of the two types of OL approaches that include three OL methods. The significance of this work is as follows: 1) The results from the comparative study showed the potential of these methods for biomedical ontology enrichment. For the two targeted domains (NCIT and RadLex), the Hearst method revealed an average of 21% and 11% new concept acceptance rates, respectively. The Lin method produced a 74% acceptance rate for NCIT; the Church method, 53%. As a result of this study (published in the Journal of Methods of Information in Medicine), many suggested candidates have been incorporated into the NCIT; 2) The evaluation framework is flexible and general enough that it can analyze the performance of ontology enrichment methods for many domains, thus expediting the process of automation and minimizing the likelihood that key concepts and relationships would be missed as domain knowledge evolves