In semantic annotation, semantic concepts are linked to natural language. Semantic annotation helps in boosting the ability to search and access resources and can be used in information retrieval systems to augment the queries from the user. In the research described in this paper, we aimed to identify ontological concepts in scientific text contained in spreadsheets. We developed a tool that can handle various types of spreadsheets. Furthermore, we used the NCBO Annotator API provided by BioPortal to enhance the semantic annotation functionality to cover spreadsheet data. Table2Annotation has strengths in certain criteria such as speed, error handling, and complex concept matching.

Due to the rapid evolution of high-throughput technologies, a tremendous amount of data is being produced in the biological domain, which poses a challenging task for information extraction and natural language understanding. Biological named entity recognition (NER) and named entity normalisation (NEN) are two common tasks aiming at identifying and linking biologically important entities such as genes or gene products mentioned in the literature to biological databases. In this paper, we present an updated version of OryzaGP, a gene and protein dataset for rice species created to help natural language processing (NLP) tools in processing NER and NEN tasks. To create the dataset, we selected more than 15,000 abstracts associated with articles previously curated for rice genes. We developed four dictionaries of gene and protein names associated with database identifiers. We used these dictionaries to annotate the dataset. We also annotated the dataset using pre-trained NLP models. Finally, we analysed the annotation results and discussed how to improve OryzaGP.

In semantic annotation, semantic concepts are linked to natural language. Semantic annotation helps in boosting the ability to search and access resources and can be used in information retrieval systems to augment the queries from the user. In the research described in this paper, we aimed to identify ontological concepts in scientific text contained in spreadsheets. We developed a tool that can handle various types of spreadsheets. Furthermore, we used the NCBO Annotator API provided by BioPortal to enhance the semantic annotation functionality to cover spreadsheet data. Table2Annotation has strengths in certain criteria such as speed, error handling, and complex concept matching.

Text mining has become an important research method in biology, with its original purpose to extract biological entities, such as genes, proteins and phenotypic traits, to extend knowledge from scientific papers. However, few thorough studies on text mining and application development, for plant molecular biology data, have been performed, especially for rice, resulting in a lack of datasets available to solve named-entity recognition tasks for this species. Since there are rare benchmarks available for rice, we faced various difficulties in exploiting advanced machine learning methods for accurate analysis of the rice literature. To evaluate several approaches to automatically extract information from gene/protein entities, we built a new dataset for rice as a benchmark. This dataset is composed of a set of titles and abstracts, extracted from scientific papers focusing on the rice species, and is downloaded from PubMed. During the 5th Biomedical Linked Annotation Hackathon, a portion of the dataset was uploaded to PubAnnotation for sharing. Our ultimate goal is to offer a shared task of rice gene/protein name recognition through the BioNLP Open Shared Tasks framework using the dataset, to facilitate an open comparison and evaluation of different approaches to the task.
Benchmarking ; Biology ; Data Mining ; Dataset ; Machine Learning ; Methods ; Molecular Biology ; Natural Language Processing ; Oryza ; Plants