English

Assigning Species Information to Corresponding Genes by a Sequence Labeling Framework

Computation and Language 2022-10-17 v1 Information Retrieval Machine Learning Genomics

Abstract

The automatic assignment of species information to the corresponding genes in a research article is a critically important step in the gene normalization task, whereby a gene mention is normalized and linked to a database record or identifier by a text-mining algorithm. Existing methods typically rely on heuristic rules based on gene and species co-occurrence in the article, but their accuracy is suboptimal. We therefore developed a high-performance method, using a novel deep learning-based framework, to classify whether there is a relation between a gene and a species. Instead of the traditional binary classification framework in which all possible pairs of genes and species in the same article are evaluated, we treat the problem as a sequence-labeling task such that only a fraction of the pairs needs to be considered. Our benchmarking results show that our approach obtains significantly higher performance compared to that of the rule-based baseline method for the species assignment task (from 65.8% to 81.3% in accuracy). The source code and data for species assignment are freely available at https://github.com/ncbi/SpeciesAssignment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.03853,
  title  = {Assigning Species Information to Corresponding Genes by a Sequence Labeling Framework},
  author = {Ling Luo and Chih-Hsuan Wei and Po-Ting Lai and Qingyu Chen and Rezarta Islamaj Doğan and Zhiyong Lu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.03853},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:10:38.044Z