1,293 research outputs found
Ontologies and Information Extraction
This report argues that, even in the simplest cases, IE is an ontology-driven
process. It is not a mere text filtering method based on simple pattern
matching and keywords, because the extracted pieces of texts are interpreted
with respect to a predefined partial domain model. This report shows that
depending on the nature and the depth of the interpretation to be done for
extracting the information, more or less knowledge must be involved. This
report is mainly illustrated in biology, a domain in which there are critical
needs for content-based exploration of the scientific literature and which
becomes a major application domain for IE
Information Retrieval Systems Adapted to the Biomedical Domain
The terminology used in Biomedicine shows lexical peculiarities that have
required the elaboration of terminological resources and information retrieval
systems with specific functionalities. The main characteristics are the high
rates of synonymy and homonymy, due to phenomena such as the proliferation of
polysemic acronyms and their interaction with common language. Information
retrieval systems in the biomedical domain use techniques oriented to the
treatment of these lexical peculiarities. In this paper we review some of the
techniques used in this domain, such as the application of Natural Language
Processing (BioNLP), the incorporation of lexical-semantic resources, and the
application of Named Entity Recognition (BioNER). Finally, we present the
evaluation methods adopted to assess the suitability of these techniques for
retrieving biomedical resources.Comment: 6 pages, 4 table
Reuse of terminological resources for efficient ontological engineering in Life Sciences
This paper is intended to explore how to use terminological resources for ontology engineering. Nowadays there are several biomedical ontologies describing overlapping domains, but there is not a clear correspondence between the concepts that are supposed to be equivalent or just similar. These resources are quite precious but their integration and further development are expensive. Terminologies may support the ontological development in several stages of the lifecycle of the ontology; e.g. ontology integration. In this paper we investigate the use of terminological resources during the ontology lifecycle. We claim that the proper creation and use of a shared thesaurus is a cornerstone for the successful application of the Semantic Web technology within life sciences. Moreover, we have applied our approach to a real scenario, the Health-e-Child (HeC) project, and we have evaluated the impact of filtering and re-organizing several resources. As a result, we have created a reference thesaurus for this project, named HeCTh
Biomedical ontology alignment: An approach based on representation learning
While representation learning techniques have shown great promise in application to a number of different NLP tasks, they have had little impact on the problem of ontology matching. Unlike past work that has focused on feature engineering, we present a novel representation learning approach that is tailored to the ontology matching task. Our approach is based on embedding ontological terms in a high-dimensional Euclidean space. This embedding is derived on the basis of a novel phrase retrofitting strategy through which semantic similarity information becomes inscribed onto fields of pre-trained word vectors. The resulting framework also incorporates a novel outlier detection mechanism based on a denoising autoencoder that is shown to improve performance. An ontology matching system derived using the proposed framework achieved an F-score of 94% on an alignment scenario involving the Adult Mouse Anatomical Dictionary and the Foundational Model of Anatomy ontology (FMA) as targets. This compares favorably with the best performing systems on the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative anatomy challenge. We performed additional experiments on aligning FMA to NCI Thesaurus and to SNOMED CT based on a reference alignment extracted from the UMLS Metathesaurus. Our system obtained overall F-scores of 93.2% and 89.2% for these experiments, thus achieving state-of-the-art results
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
Ontology: A Linked Data Hub for Mathematics
In this paper, we present an ontology of mathematical knowledge concepts that
covers a wide range of the fields of mathematics and introduces a balanced
representation between comprehensive and sensible models. We demonstrate the
applications of this representation in information extraction, semantic search,
and education. We argue that the ontology can be a core of future integration
of math-aware data sets in the Web of Data and, therefore, provide mappings
onto relevant datasets, such as DBpedia and ScienceWISE.Comment: 15 pages, 6 images, 1 table, Knowledge Engineering and the Semantic
Web - 5th International Conferenc
A knowledge-based approach to information extraction for semantic interoperability in the archaeology domain
The paper presents a method for automatic semantic indexing of archaeological grey-literature reports using empirical (rule-based) Information Extraction techniques in combination with domain-specific knowledge organization systems. Performance is evaluated via the Gold Standard method. The semantic annotation system (OPTIMA) performs the tasks of Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, Negation Detection and Word Sense disambiguation using hand-crafted rules and terminological resources for associating contextual abstractions with classes of the standard ontology (ISO 21127:2006) CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) for cultural heritage and its archaeological extension, CRM-EH, together with concepts from English Heritage thesauri and glossaries.Relation Extraction performance benefits from a syntactic based definition of relation extraction patterns derived from domain oriented corpus analysis. The evaluation also shows clear benefit in the use of assistive NLP modules relating to word-sense disambiguation, negation detection and noun phrase validation, together with controlled thesaurus expansion.The semantic indexing results demonstrate the capacity of rule-based Information Extraction techniques to deliver interoperable semantic abstractions (semantic annotations) with respect to the CIDOC CRM and archaeological thesauri. Major contributions include recognition of relevant entities using shallow parsing NLP techniques driven by a complimentary use of ontological and terminological domain resources and empirical derivation of context-driven relation extraction rules for the recognition of semantic relationships from phrases of unstructured text. The semantic annotations have proven capable of supporting semantic query, document study and cross-searching via the ontology framework
A Robust Linguistic Platform for Efficient and Domain specific Web Content Analysis
Web semantic access in specific domains calls for specialized search engines
with enhanced semantic querying and indexing capacities, which pertain both to
information retrieval (IR) and to information extraction (IE). A rich
linguistic analysis is required either to identify the relevant semantic units
to index and weight them according to linguistic specific statistical
distribution, or as the basis of an information extraction process. Recent
developments make Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques reliable enough
to process large collections of documents and to enrich them with semantic
annotations. This paper focuses on the design and the development of a text
processing platform, Ogmios, which has been developed in the ALVIS project. The
Ogmios platform exploits existing NLP modules and resources, which may be tuned
to specific domains and produces linguistically annotated documents. We show
how the three constraints of genericity, domain semantic awareness and
performance can be handled all together
Semantic Indexing via Knowledge Organization Systems: Applying the CIDOC-CRM to Archaeological Grey Literature
The volume of archaeological reports being produced since the introduction of PG161
has
significantly increased, as a result of the increased volume of archaeological investigations
conducted by academic and commercial archaeology. It is highly desirable to be able to
search effectively within and across such reports in order to find information that promotes
quality research. A potential dissemination of information via semantic technologies offers
the opportunity to improve archaeological practice, not only by enabling access to
information but also by changing how information is structured and the way research is
conducted.
This thesis presents a method for automatic semantic indexing of archaeological greyliterature
reports using rule-based Information Extraction techniques in combination with
domain-specific ontological and terminological resources. This semantic annotation of
contextual abstractions from archaeological grey-literature is driven by Natural Language
Processing (NLP) techniques which are used to identify “rich” meaningful pieces of text,
thus overcoming barriers in document indexing and retrieval imposed by the use of natural
language. The semantic annotation system (OPTIMA) performs the NLP tasks of Named
Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, Negation Detection and Word Sense
disambiguation using hand-crafted rules and terminological resources for associating
contextual abstractions with classes of the ISO Standard (ISO 21127:2006) CIDOC
Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) for cultural heritage and its archaeological extension,
CRM-EH, together with concepts from English Heritage thesauri and glossaries.
The results demonstrate that the techniques can deliver semantic annotations of
archaeological grey literature documents with respect to the domain conceptual models.
Such semantic annotations have proven capable of supporting semantic query, document
study and cross-searching via web based applications. The research outcomes have
provided semantic annotations for the Semantic Technologies for Archaeological
Resources (STAR) project, which explored the potential of semantic technologies in the
integration of archaeological digital resources. The thesis represents the first discussion on
the employment of CIDOC CRM and CRM-EH in semantic annotation of grey-literature
documents using rule-based Information Extraction techniques driven by a supplementary
exploitation of domain-specific ontological and terminological resources. It is anticipated
that the methods can be generalised in the future to the broader field of Digital Humanities
Alignment of the UMLS semantic network with BioTop: Methodology and assessment
Motivation: For many years, the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) semantic network (SN) has been used as an upper-level semantic framework for the categorization of terms from terminological resources in biomedicine. BioTop has recently been developed as an upper-level ontology for the biomedical domain. In contrast to the SN, it is founded upon strict ontological principles, using OWL DL as a formal representation language, which has become standard in the semantic Web. In order to make logic-based reasoning available for the resources annotated or categorized with the SN, a mapping ontology was developed aligning the SN with BioTop. Methods: The theoretical foundations and the practical realization of the alignment are being described, with a focus on the design decisions taken, the problems encountered and the adaptations of BioTop that became necessary. For evaluation purposes, UMLS concept pairs obtained from MEDLINE abstracts by a named entity recognition system were tested for possible semantic relationships. Furthermore, all semantic-type combinations that occur in the UMLS Metathesaurus were checked for satisfiability. Results: The effort-intensive alignment process required major design changes and enhancements of BioTop and brought up s
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