Automated service selection using natural language processing

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015. With the huge number of services that are available online, requirements analysts face an overload of choice when they have to select the most suitable service that satisfies a set of customer requirements. Both service descriptions and requirements are often expressed in natural language (NL), and natural language processing (NLP) tools that can match requirements and service descriptions, while filtering out irrelevant options, might alleviate the problem of choice overload faced by analysts. In this paper, we propose a NLP approach based on Knowledge Graphs that automates the process of service selection by ranking the service descriptions depending on their NL similarity with the requirements. To evaluate the approach, we have performed an experiment with 28 customer requirements and 91 service descriptions, previously ranked by a human assessor. We selected the top-15 services, which were ranked with the proposed approach, and found 53% similar results with respect to top-15 services of the manual ranking. The same task, performed with the traditional cosine similarity ranking, produces only 13% similar results. The outcomes of our experiment are promising, and new insights have also emerged for further improvement of the proposed technique

Control of prostate cell growth: BMP antagonizes androgen mitogenic activity with incorporation of MAPK signals in Smad1

Alterations in the signaling pathways of bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) and activation of the ERK/MAP kinase (MAPK) pathway by growth factors have been implicated in the development and progression of prostate cancer. Smad1 acts as a substrate for MAPKs and also performs a central role in transmitting signals from BMPs. We found that BMPs/Smad1 signaling inhibits the growth of androgen-sensitive prostate cancer cells. Upon the incorporation of ERK/MAPK signals at its linker region, Smad1 physically interacts with androgen-activated androgen receptor (AR) and suppresses its functions. BMPs induce the function of Smad1 as an AR transcriptional corepressor. We demonstrated in vivo that Smad1 signaling is low in androgen-regulated growth of prostate cancer, is activated after castration, and also is decreased in hormone-independent tumors. The activation status of ERK/MAPK parallels Smad1 in the progression of prostate cancer; thus, our findings indicate a molecular basis for the integration of signals of MAPK and Smad1 in the progression and androgen regulation of prostate cancer