Applying a text mining framework to the extraction of numerical parameters from scientific literature in the biotechnology domain

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, André Fernandes
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Outros Autores: Nogueira, R., Lourenço, Anália
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/32581
• topic: Text mining; Biotechnology applications; Procedure optimization; Science & Technology

Scientific publications are the main vehicle to disseminate information in the field of biotechnology for wastewater treatment. Indeed, the new research paradigms and the application of high-throughput technologies have increased the rate of publication considerably. The problem is that manual curation becomes harder, prone-to-errors and time-consuming, leading to a probable loss of information and inefficient knowledge acquisition. As a result, research outputs are hardly reaching engineers, hampering the calibration of mathematical models used to optimize the stability and performance of biotechnological systems. In this context, we have developed a data curation workflow, based on text mining techniques, to extract numerical parameters from scientific literature, and applied it to the biotechnology domain. A workflow was built to process wastewater-related articles with the main goal of identifying physico-chemical parameters mentioned in the text. This work describes the implementation of the workflow, identifies achievements and current limitations in the overall process, and presents the results obtained for a corpus of 50 full-text documents.