Next generation community assessment of biomedical entity recognition web servers: metrics, performance, interoperability aspects of BeCalm

Background Shared tasks and community challenges represent key instruments to promote research, collaboration and determine the state of the art of biomedical and chemical text mining technologies. Traditionally, such tasks relied on the comparison of automatically generated results against a so-cal...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Pérez Pérez, Martín, Pérez Rodríguez, Gael, Blanco Míguez, Aitor, Fernández Riverola, Florentino, Valencia, Alfonso|||0000-0002-8937-6789, Krallinger, Martin, Lourenço, Anália
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2019
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/191732
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/191732
https://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13321-019-0363-6
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Data mining
Biomedical engineering
Natural language processing
Representational State Transfer (Software architecture)
Textual data
Named entity recognition
Shared task
REST‑API
TIPS
BeCalm metaserver
Patent mining
Annotation server
Continuous evaluation
BioCreative
Text mining
Mineria de dades
Enginyeria biomèdica
natural language datasets
Transferència d'estat representacional (Disseny del programari)
tips
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Aplicacions de la informàtica::Bioinformàtica
Descripción
Sumario:Background Shared tasks and community challenges represent key instruments to promote research, collaboration and determine the state of the art of biomedical and chemical text mining technologies. Traditionally, such tasks relied on the comparison of automatically generated results against a so-called Gold Standard dataset of manually labelled textual data, regardless of efficiency and robustness of the underlying implementations. Due to the rapid growth of unstructured data collections, including patent databases and particularly the scientific literature, there is a pressing need to generate, assess and expose robust big data text mining solutions to semantically enrich documents in real time. To address this pressing need, a novel track called “Technical interoperability and performance of annotation servers” was launched under the umbrella of the BioCreative text mining evaluation effort. The aim of this track was to enable the continuous assessment of technical aspects of text annotation web servers, specifically of online biomedical named entity recognition systems of interest for medicinal chemistry applications. Results A total of 15 out of 26 registered teams successfully implemented online annotation servers. They returned predictions during a two-month period in predefined formats and were evaluated through the BeCalm evaluation platform, specifically developed for this track. The track encompassed three levels of evaluation, i.e. data format considerations, technical metrics and functional specifications. Participating annotation servers were implemented in seven different programming languages and covered 12 general entity types. The continuous evaluation of server responses accounted for testing periods of low activity and moderate to high activity, encompassing overall 4,092,502 requests from three different document provider settings. The median response time was below 3.74 s, with a median of 10 annotations/document. Most of the servers showed great reliability and stability, being able to process over 100,000 requests in a 5-day period. Conclusions The presented track was a novel experimental task that systematically evaluated the technical performance aspects of online entity recognition systems. It raised the interest of a significant number of participants. Future editions of the competition will address the ability to process documents in bulk as well as to annotate full-text documents.