Applying citizen science to gene, drug and disease relationship extraction from biomedical abstracts.

Journal: Bioinformatics (Oxford, England)
Published Date:

Abstract

MOTIVATION: Biomedical literature is growing at a rate that outpaces our ability to harness the knowledge contained therein. To mine valuable inferences from the large volume of literature, many researchers use information extraction algorithms to harvest information in biomedical texts. Information extraction is usually accomplished via a combination of manual expert curation and computational methods. Advances in computational methods usually depend on the time-consuming generation of gold standards by a limited number of expert curators. Citizen science is public participation in scientific research. We previously found that citizen scientists are willing and capable of performing named entity recognition of disease mentions in biomedical abstracts, but did not know if this was true with relationship extraction (RE).

Authors

  • Ginger Tsueng
    Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA.
  • Max Nanis
    Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA.
  • Jennifer T Fouquier
    Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA.
  • Michael Mayers
    The Scripps Research Institute, 10550 N Torrey Pines Rd, La Jolla, CA, 92037, USA.
  • Benjamin M Good
    Department of Molecular and Experimental Medicine, the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA.
  • Andrew I Su
    Department of Molecular and Experimental Medicine, the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA.