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Biomedical subjects

Hinrich Schütze

Publications and source records attributed to Hinrich Schütze.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

GAPSCORE: finding gene and protein names one word at a time.

MOTIVATION: New high-throughput technologies have accelerated the accumulation of knowledge about genes and proteins. However, much knowledge is still stored as written natural language text. Therefore, we have developed a new method, GAPSCORE, to identify gene and protein names in text. GAPSCORE scores words based on a statistical model of gene names that quantifies their appearance, morphology and context. RESULTS: We evaluated GAPSCORE against the Yapex data set and achieved an F-score of 82.5% (83.3% recall, 81.5% precision) for partial matches and 57.6% (58.5% recall, 56.7% precision) for exact matches. Since the method is statistical, users can choose score cutoffs that adjust the performance according to their needs. AVAILABILITY: GAPSCORE is available at http://bionlp.stanford.edu/gapscore/

Abstracting and Indexing↗

Using text analysis to identify functionally coherent gene groups.

The analysis of large-scale genomic information (such as sequence data or expression patterns) frequently involves grouping genes on the basis of common experimental features. Often, as with gene expression clustering, there are too many groups to easily identify the functionally relevant ones. One valuable source of information about gene function is the published literature. We present a method, neighbor divergence, for assessing whether the genes within a group share a common biological function based on their associated scientific literature. The method uses statistical natural language processing techniques to interpret biological text. It requires only a corpus of documents relevant to the genes being studied (e.g., all genes in an organism) and an index connecting the documents to appropriate genes. Given a group of genes, neighbor divergence assigns a numerical score indicating how "functionally coherent" the gene group is from the perspective of the published literature. We evaluate our method by testing its ability to distinguish 19 known functional gene groups from 1900 randomly assembled groups. Neighbor divergence achieves 79% sensitivity at 100% specificity, comparing favorably to other tested methods. We also apply neighbor divergence to previously published gene expression clusters to assess its ability to recognize gene groups that had been manually identified as representative of a common function.

Algorithms↗

Creating an online dictionary of abbreviations from MEDLINE.

OBJECTIVE: The growth of the biomedical literature presents special challenges for both human readers and automatic algorithms. One such challenge derives from the common and uncontrolled use of abbreviations in the literature. Each additional abbreviation increases the effective size of the vocabulary for a field. Therefore, to create an automatically generated and maintained lexicon of abbreviations, we have developed an algorithm to match abbreviations in text with their expansions. DESIGN: Our method uses a statistical learning algorithm, logistic regression, to score abbreviation expansions based on their resemblance to a training set of human-annotated abbreviations. We applied it to Medstract, a corpus of MEDLINE abstracts in which abbreviations and their expansions have been manually annotated. We then ran the algorithm on all abstracts in MEDLINE, creating a dictionary of biomedical abbreviations. To test the coverage of the database, we used an independently created list of abbreviations from the China Medical Tribune. MEASUREMENTS: We measured the recall and precision of the algorithm in identifying abbreviations from the Medstract corpus. We also measured the recall when searching for abbreviations from the China Medical Tribune against the database. RESULTS: On the Medstract corpus, our algorithm achieves up to 83% recall at 80% precision. Applying the algorithm to all of MEDLINE yielded a database of 781,632 high-scoring abbreviations. Of all the abbreviations in the list from the China Medical Tribune, 88% were in the database. CONCLUSION: We have developed an algorithm to identify abbreviations from text. We are making this available as a public abbreviation server at \url[http://abbreviation.stanford.edu/].

Abbreviations as Topic↗