Evidence map›Paper›PMID 25949785›Full record

ArticleJournal of biomedical semantics2015

Formalizing biomedical concepts from textual definitions.

Alina Petrova, Yue Ma, George Tsatsaronis, Maria Kissa, Felix Distel, Franz Baader, Michael Schroeder

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of biomedical semantics, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
1citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

1 citing paper in PubMed.

  1. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

7 authors.

Alina PetrovaBiotechnology Center, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Yue MaInstitute of Theoretical Computer Science, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
George TsatsaronisBiotechnology Center, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Maria KissaBiotechnology Center, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Felix DistelInstitute of Theoretical Computer Science, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Franz BaaderInstitute of Theoretical Computer Science, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Michael SchroederBiotechnology Center, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

backgroundOntologies play a major role in life sciences, enabling a number of applications, from new data integration to knowledge verification. SNOMED CT is a large medical ontology that is formally defined so that it ensures global consistency and support of complex reasoning tasks. Most biomedical ontologies and taxonomies on the other hand define concepts only textually, without the use of logic. Here, we investigate how to automatically generate formal concept definitions from textual ones. We develop a method that uses machine learning in combination with several types of lexical and semantic features and outputs formal definitions that follow the structure of SNOMED CT concept definitions.

resultsWe evaluate our method on three benchmarks and test both the underlying relation extraction component as well as the overall quality of output concept definitions. In addition, we provide an analysis on the following aspects: (1) How do definitions mined from the Web and literature differ from the ones mined from manually created definitions, e.g., MeSH? (2) How do different feature representations, e.g., the restrictions of relations' domain and range, impact on the generated definition quality?, (3) How do different machine learning algorithms compare to each other for the task of formal definition generation?, and, (4) What is the influence of the learning data size to the task? We discuss all of these settings in detail and show that the suggested approach can achieve success rates of over 90%. In addition, the results show that the choice of corpora, lexical features, learning algorithm and data size do not impact the performance as strongly as semantic types do. Semantic types limit the domain and range of a predicted relation, and as long as relations' domain and range pairs do not overlap, this information is most valuable in formalizing textual definitions.

conclusionsThe analysis presented in this manuscript implies that automated methods can provide a valuable contribution to the formalization of biomedical knowledge, thus paving the way for future applications that go beyond retrieval and into complex reasoning. The method is implemented and accessible to the public from: https://github.com/alifahsyamsiyah/learningDL.

Indexed as

Biomedical ontologiesFormal definitionsMeSHRelation extractionSNOMED CT

Identifiers

PMID25949785
PMCPMC4422531

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.