14 research outputs found
Pipelines for Procedural Information Extraction from Scientific Literature: Towards Recipes using Machine Learning and Data Science
This paper describes a machine learning and data science pipeline for
structured information extraction from documents, implemented as a suite of
open-source tools and extensions to existing tools. It centers around a
methodology for extracting procedural information in the form of recipes,
stepwise procedures for creating an artifact (in this case synthesizing a
nanomaterial), from published scientific literature. From our overall goal of
producing recipes from free text, we derive the technical objectives of a
system consisting of pipeline stages: document acquisition and filtering,
payload extraction, recipe step extraction as a relationship extraction task,
recipe assembly, and presentation through an information retrieval interface
with question answering (QA) functionality. This system meets computational
information and knowledge management (CIKM) requirements of metadata-driven
payload extraction, named entity extraction, and relationship extraction from
text. Functional contributions described in this paper include semi-supervised
machine learning methods for PDF filtering and payload extraction tasks,
followed by structured extraction and data transformation tasks beginning with
section extraction, recipe steps as information tuples, and finally assembled
recipes. Measurable objective criteria for extraction quality include precision
and recall of recipe steps, ordering constraints, and QA accuracy, precision,
and recall. Results, key novel contributions, and significant open problems
derived from this work center around the attribution of these holistic quality
measures to specific machine learning and inference stages of the pipeline,
each with their performance measures. The desired recipes contain identified
preconditions, material inputs, and operations, and constitute the overall
output generated by our computational information and knowledge management
(CIKM) system.Comment: 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition
Workshops (ICDARW 2019
Pest control and resistance management through release of insects carrying a male-selecting transgene
Development and evaluation of new insect pest management tools is critical for overcoming over-reliance upon, and growing resistance to, synthetic, biological and plant-expressed insecticides. For transgenic crops expressing insecticidal proteins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (‘Bt crops’) emergence of resistance is slowed by maintaining a proportion of the crop as non-Bt varieties, which produce pest insects unselected for resistance. While this strategy has been largely successful, multiple cases of Bt resistance have now been reported.
One new approach to pest management is the use of genetically engineered insects to suppress populations of their own species. Models suggest that released insects carrying male-selecting (MS) transgenes would be effective agents of direct, species-specific pest management by preventing survival of female progeny, and simultaneously provide an alternative insecticide resistance management strategy by introgression of susceptibility alleles into target populations. We developed a MS strain of the diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella, a serious global pest of crucifers. MS-strain larvae are reared as normal with dietary tetracycline, but, when reared without tetracycline or on host plants, only males will survive to adulthood. We used this strain in glasshouse-cages to study the effect of MS male P. xylostella releases on target pest population size and spread of Bt resistance in these populations