Enrichment of the Phenotypic and Genotypic Data Warehouse analysis using Question Answering systems to facilitate the decision making process in cereal breeding programs

Currently there are an overwhelming number of scientific publications in Life Sciences, especially in Genetics and Biotechnology. This huge amount of information is structured in corporate Data Warehouses (DW) or in Biological Databases (e.g. UniProt, RCSB Protein Data Bank, CEREALAB or GenBank), whose main drawback is its cost of updating that makes it obsolete easily. However, these Databases are the main tool for enterprises when they want to update their internal information, for example when a plant breeder enterprise needs to enrich its genetic information (internal structured Database) with recently discovered genes related to specific phenotypic traits (external unstructured data) in order to choose the desired parentals for breeding programs. In this paper, we propose to complement the internal information with external data from the Web using Question Answering (QA) techniques. We go a step further by providing a complete framework for integrating unstructured and structured information by combining traditional Databases and DW architectures with QA systems. The great advantage of our framework is that decision makers can compare instantaneously internal data with external data from competitors, thereby allowing taking quick strategic decisions based on richer data.This paper has been partially supported by the MESOLAP (TIN2010-14860) and GEODAS-BI (TIN2012-37493-C03-03) projects from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Competitivity. Alejandro Maté is funded by the Generalitat Valenciana under an ACIF grant (ACIF/2010/298)

Improving Retrieval of Information from the Internet

To improve the quality of the search result returned by the internet which makes users have to look through a huge amount of links for the real answers, we utilized the high quality links Google produces and the Information Retrieval technology to implement a Question Answering (QA) system. This system analyzes and downloads the text contents from the relevant web pages Google searches based on the users\u27 questions to build a dynamic knowledge collection; retrieves the relevant passages from the collection and sends the ranked passages back. The users can further refine their questions in the query refinement step for the better answers. A novel search strategy was designed to detect the semantic connections between the question and the documents. This answer retrieval also involves the TF-IDF algorithm and Vector Space Model for the document indexing. We have modified the original Cosine Coefficient Similarity Measurement to rank the candidate answers