Vocabulary Matters: An Annotation Pipeline and Four Deep Learning Algorithms for Enzyme Named Entity Recognition.

Journal: Journal of proteome research
PMID:

Abstract

Enzymes are indispensable in many biological processes, and with biomedical literature growing exponentially, effective literature review becomes increasingly challenging. Natural language processing methods offer solutions to streamline this process. This study aims to develop an annotated enzyme corpus for training and evaluating enzyme named entity recognition (NER) models. A novel pipeline, combining dictionary matching and rule-based keyword searching, automatically annotated enzyme entities in >4800 full-text publications. Four deep learning NER models were created with different vocabularies (BioBERT/SciBERT) and architectures (BiLSTM/transformer) and evaluated on 526 manually annotated full-text publications. The annotation pipeline achieved an 1-score of 0.86 (precision = 1.00, recall = 0.76), surpassed by fine-tuned transformers for 1-score (BioBERT: 0.89, SciBERT: 0.88) and recall (0.86) with BiLSTM models having higher precision (0.94) than transformers (0.92). The annotation pipeline runs in seconds on standard laptops with almost perfect precision, but was outperformed by fine-tuned transformers in terms of 1-score and recall, demonstrating generalizability beyond the training data. In comparison, SciBERT-based models exhibited higher precision, and BioBERT-based models exhibited higher recall, highlighting the importance of vocabulary and architecture. These models, representing the first enzyme NER algorithms, enable more effective enzyme text mining and information extraction. Codes for automated annotation and model generation are available from https://github.com/omicsNLP/enzymeNER and https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10581586.

Authors

  • Meiqi Wang
    Section of Bioinformatics, Division of Systems Medicine, Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction, Imperial College London, London W12 0NN, U.K.
  • Avish Vijayaraghavan
    Section of Bioinformatics, Division of Systems Medicine, Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction, Imperial College London, London W12 0NN, U.K.
  • Tim Beck
    Department of Genetics, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK.
  • Joram M Posma
    Section of Bioinformatics, Division of Systems Medicine, Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction, Imperial College London, London W12 0NN, U.K.