Extracting Chemical Reactions from Biological Literature

Abstract

Synthetic biologists must comb through vast amounts of academic literature to design biological systems. The majority of this data is unstructured and difficult to query because they are manually annotated. Existing databases such as PubMed already contain over 20 million citations and are growing at a rate of 500,000 new citations every year. Our solution is to automatically extract chemical reactions from biological text and canonicalize them so that they can be easily indexed and queried. This paper describes a natural language processing system that generates patterns from labeled training data and uses them to extract chemical reactions from PubMed. To train and validate our system, we create a dataset using BRENDA, the BRaunschweig ENzyme DAtabase, with 4387 labeled sentences. Our system achieves a recall of 0.82 and a precision of 0.88 via cross validation. On a selection of 600,000 PubMed abstracts, our system extracts almost 20% of existing reactions in BRENDA as well as many that are novel.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 16, 2014
Accession Number
ADA605115

Entities

People

  • Jeffrey Tsui

Organizations

  • University of California, Berkeley

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Acetaldehyde
  • Acids
  • Carbon Dioxide
  • Chemical Reactions
  • Computer Science
  • Conversion
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Engineering
  • Escherichia Coli
  • Lactic Acid
  • Molecules
  • Precision
  • Pyruvic Acid
  • Substrates
  • Training
  • Validation

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Information Retrieval
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks