bioRxiv Science⌕ Search

Biology subjects

Teodoro, D.

Publications and source records attributed to Teodoro, D..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

BioWiC: An Evaluation Benchmark for Biomedical Concept Representation

Due to the complexity of the biomedical domain, the ability to capture semantically meaningful representations of terms in context is a long-standing challenge. Despite important progress in the past years, no evaluation benchmark has been developed to evaluate how well language models represent biomedical concepts according to their corresponding context. Inspired by the Word-in-Context (WiC) benchmark, in which word sense disambiguation is reformulated as a binary classification task, we propose a novel dataset, BioWiC, to evaluate the ability of language models to encode biomedical terms in context. We evaluate BioWiC both intrinsically and extrinsically and show that it could be used as a reliable benchmark for evaluating context-dependent embeddings in biomedical corpora. In addition, we conduct several experiments using a variety of discriminative and generative large language models to establish robust baselines that can serve as a foundation for future research.

bioinformatics↗

Ensemble of deep learning language models to support the creation of living systematic reviews for the COVID-19 literature: a retrospective study

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented amount of scientific publications, growing at a pace never seen before. Multiple living systematic reviews have been developed to assist professionals with up-to-date and trustworthy health information, but it is increasingly challenging for systematic reviewers to keep up with the evidence in electronic databases. We aimed to investigate deep learning-based machine learning algorithms to classify COVID-19 related publications to help scale-up the epidemiological curation process. MethodsIn this retrospective study, five different pre-trained deep learning-based language models were fine-tuned on a dataset of 6,365 publications manually classified into two classes, three subclasses and 22 sub-subclasses relevant for epidemiological triage purposes. In a k-fold cross-validation setting, each standalone model was assessed on a classification task and compared against an ensemble, which takes the standalone model predictions as input and uses different strategies to infer the optimal article class. A ranking task was also considered, in which the model outputs a ranked list of sub-subclasses associated with the article. ResultsThe ensemble model significantly outperformed the standalone classifiers, achieving a F1-score of 89.2 at the class level of the classification task. The difference between the standalone and ensemble models increases at the sub-subclass level, where the ensemble reaches a micro F1-score of 70% against 67% for the best performing standalone model. For the ranking task, the ensemble obtained the highest recall@3, with a performance of 89%. Using an unanimity voting rule, the ensemble can provide predictions with higher confidence on a subset of the data, achieving detection of original papers with a F1-score up to 97% on a subset of 80% of the collection instead of 93% on the whole dataset. ConclusionThis study shows the potential of using deep learning language models to perform triage of COVID-19 references efficiently and support epidemiological curation and review. The ensemble consistently and significantly outperforms any standalone model. Fine-tuning the voting strategy thresholds is an interesting alternative to annotate a subset with higher predictive confidence.

bioinformatics↗

Information retrieval in an infodemic: the case of COVID-19 publications

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an exponential surge and an enormous amount of published literature, both accurate and inaccurate, a term usually coined as an infodemic. In the context of searching for COVID-19 related scientific literature, we present an information retrieval methodology for effectively finding relevant publications for different information needs. Our multi-stage information retrieval architecture combines probabilistic weighting models and re-ranking algorithms based on neural masked language models. The methodology was evaluated in the context of the TREC-COVID challenge, achieving competitive results with the top ranking teams participating in the competition. Particularly, the ranking combination of bag-of-words and language models significantly outperformed a BM25-based baseline model (16 percentage points for the NDCG@20 metric), correctly retrieving more than 16 out of the top 20 documents retrieved. The proposed pipeline could thus support the effective search and discovery of relevant information in the case of an infodemic.

bioinformatics↗

UPCLASS: a Deep Learning-based Classifier for UniProtKB Entry Publications

In the UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB), publications providing evidence for a specific protein annotation entry are organized across different categories, such as function, interaction and expression, based on the type of data they contain. To provide a systematic way of categorizing computationally mapped bibliography in UniProt, we investigate a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) model to classify publications with accession annotations according to UniProtKB categories. The main challenge to categorize publications at the accession annotation level is that the same publication can be annotated with multiple proteins, and thus be associated to different category sets according to the evidence provided for the protein. We propose a model that divides the document into parts containing and not containing evidence for the protein annotation. Then, we use these parts to create different feature sets for each accession and feed them to separate layers of the network. The CNN model achieved a F1-score of 0.72, outperforming baseline models based on logistic regression and support vector machine by up to 22 and 18 percentage points, respectively. We believe that such approach could be used to systematically categorize the computationally mapped bibliography in UniProtKB, which represents a significant set of the publications, and help curators to decide whether a publication is relevant for further curation for a protein accession.

bioinformatics↗