Nala: Text mining natural language mutation mentions

Juan Miguel Cejuela, Aleksandar Bojchevski, Carsten Uhlig, Rustem Bekmukhametov, Sanjeev Kumar Karn, Shpend Mahmuti, Ashish Baghudana, Ankit Dubey, Venkata P. Satagopam, Burkhard Rost

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

16 Scopus citations

Abstract

Motivation: The extraction of sequence variants from the literature remains an important task. Existing methods primarily target standard (ST) mutation mentions (e.g.'E6V'), leaving relevant mentions natural language (NL) largely untapped (e.g.'glutamic acid was substituted by valine at residue 6'). Results: We introduced three new corpora suggesting named-entity recognition (NER) to be more challenging than anticipated: 28-77% of all articles contained mentions only available in NL. Our new method nala captured NL and ST by combining conditional random fields with word embedding features learned unsupervised from the entire PubMed. In our hands, nala substantially outperformed the state-of-the-art. For instance, we compared all unique mentions in new discoveries correctly detected by any of three methods (SETH, tmVar, or nala). Neither SETH nor tmVar discovered anything missed by nala, while nala uniquely tagged 33% mentions. For NL mentions the corresponding value shot up to 100% nala-only. Availability and Implementation: Source code, API and corpora freely available at: http://tagtog.net/-corpora/IDP4+.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1852-1858
Number of pages7
JournalBioinformatics
Volume33
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 Jun 2017

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