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Abstract The BioCreative National Library of Medicine (NLM)-Chem track calls for a community effort to fine-tune automated recognition of chemical names in the biomedical literature. Chemicals are oneerature. Chemicals are one of the most searched biomedical entities in PubMed, and—as highlighted during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic—their identification may significantly advance research in multiple biomedical subfields. While previous community challenges focused on identifying chemical names mentioned in titles and abstracts, the full text contains valuable additional detail. We, therefore, organized the BioCreative NLM-Chem track as a community effort to address automated chemical entity recognition in full-text articles. The track consisted of two tasks: (i) chemical identification and (ii) chemical indexing. The chemical identification task required predicting all chemicals mentioned in recently published full-text articles, both span [i.e. named entity recognition (NER)] and normalization (i.e. entity linking), using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). The chemical indexing task required identifying which chemicals reflect topics for each article and should therefore appear in the listing of MeSH terms for the document in the MEDLINE article indexing. This manuscript summarizes the BioCreative NLM-Chem track and post-challenge experiments. We received a total of 85 submissions from 17 teams worldwide. The highest performance achieved for the chemical identification task was 0.8672 F-score (0.8759 precision and 0.8587 recall) for strict NER performance and 0.8136 F-score (0.8621 precision and 0.7702 recall) for strict normalization performance. The highest performance achieved for the chemical indexing task was 0.6073 F-score (0.7417 precision and 0.5141 recall). This community challenge demonstrated that (i) the current substantial achievements in deep learning technologies can be utilized to improve automated prediction accuracy further and (ii) the chemical indexing task is substantially more challenging. We look forward to further developing biomedical text–mining methods to respond to the rapid growth of biomedical literature. The NLM-Chem track dataset and other challenge materials are publicly available at https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/lu/BC7-NLM-Chem-track/. Database URL https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/lu/BC7-NLM-Chem-track/

Authors: Robert Leaman, Rezarta Islamaj, Virginia Adams, Mohammed A Alliheedi, João Rafael Almeida, Rui Antunes, Robert Bevan, Yung-Chun Chang, Arslan Erdengasileng, Matthew Hodgskiss, Ryuki Ida, Hyunjae Kim, Keqiao Li, Robert E Mercer, Lukrécia Mertová, Ghadeer Mobasher, Hoo-Chang Shin, Mujeen Sung, Tomoki Tsujimura, Wen-Chao Yeh, Zhiyong Lu

Date Published: 2023

Publication Type: Journal

Abstract (Expand)

Fine-tuning biomedical pre-trained language models (BioPLMs) such as BioBERT has become a common practice dominating leaderboards across various natural language processing tasks. Despite their success and wide adoption, prevailing fine-tuning approaches for named entity recognition (NER) naively train BioPLMs on targeted datasets without considering class distributions. This is problematic especially when dealing with imbalanced biomedical gold-standard datasets for NER in which most biomedical entities are underrepresented. In this paper, we address the class imbalance problem and propose WeLT, a cost-sensitive fine-tuning approach based on new re-scaled class weights for the task of biomedical NER. We evaluate WeLT’s fine-tuning performance on mixed-domain and domain-specific BioPLMs using eight biomedical gold-standard datasets. We compare our approach against vanilla fine-tuning and three other existing re-weighting schemes. Our results show the positive impact of handling the class imbalance problem. WeLT outperforms all the vanilla fine-tuned models. Furthermore, our method demonstrates advantages over other existing weighting schemes in most experiments.

Authors: Ghadeer Mobasher, Wolfgang Müller, Olga Krebs, Michael Gertz

Date Published: 2023

Publication Type: Proceedings

Abstract (Expand)

Chemical named entity recognition (NER) is a significant step for many downstream applications like entity linking for the chemical text-mining pipeline. However, the identification of chemical entities in a biomedical text is a challenging task due to the diverse morphology of chemical entities and the different types of chemical nomenclature. In this work, we describe our approach that was submitted for BioCreative version 7 challenge Track 2, focusing on the ‘Chemical Identification’ task for identifying chemical entities and entity linking, using MeSH. For this purpose, we have applied a two-stage approach as follows (a) usage of fine-tuned BioBERT for identification of chemical entities (b) semantic approximate search in MeSH and PubChem databases for entity linking. There was some friction between the two approaches, as our rule-based approach did not harmonise optimally with partially recognized words forwarded by the BERT component. For our future work, we aim to resolve the issue of the artefacts arising from BERT tokenizers and develop joint learning of chemical named entity recognition and entity linking using pre-trained transformer-based models and compare their performance with our preliminary approach. Next, we will improve the efficiency of our approximate search in reference databases during entity linking. This task is non-trivial as it entails determining similarity scores of large sets of trees with respect to a query tree. Ideally, this will enable flexible parametrization and rule selection for the entity linking search.

Authors: Ghadeer Mobasher, Lukrécia Mertová, Sucheta Ghosh, Olga Krebs, Bettina Heinlein, Wolfgang Müller

Date Published: 11th Nov 2021

Publication Type: Proceedings

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