BC4GO: a full-text corpus for the BioCreative IV GO task

Kimberly Van Auken; Mary L Schaeffer; Peter McQuilton; Stanley J F Laulederkind; Donghui Li; Shur-Jen Wang; G Thomas Hayman; Susan Tweedie; Cecilia N Arighi; James Done; Hans-Michael Müller; Paul W Sternberg; Yuqing Mao; Chih-Hsuan Wei; Zhiyong Lu

doi:10.1093/database/bau074

BC4GO: a full-text corpus for the BioCreative IV GO task

Database (Oxford). 2014 Jul 28:2014:bau074. doi: 10.1093/database/bau074. Print 2014.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ WormBase, Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA, USDA-ARS Plant Genetics Research Unit and Division of Plant Sciences, Department of Agronomy, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA, FlyBase, Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EH, UK, Rat Genome Database, Human and Molecular Genetics Center, Medical College of Wisconsin, 8701 Watertown Plank Road, Milwaukee, WI 53226, USA, TAIR, Department of Plant Biology, Carnegie Institution for Science, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305, USA, Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Delaware, 15 Innovation Way, Newark, DE 19711, USA, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA, National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA.
² WormBase, Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA, USDA-ARS Plant Genetics Research Unit and Division of Plant Sciences, Department of Agronomy, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA, FlyBase, Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EH, UK, Rat Genome Database, Human and Molecular Genetics Center, Medical College of Wisconsin, 8701 Watertown Plank Road, Milwaukee, WI 53226, USA, TAIR, Department of Plant Biology, Carnegie Institution for Science, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305, USA, Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Delaware, 15 Innovation Way, Newark, DE 19711, USA, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA, National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894, USAWormBase, Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA, USDA-ARS Plant Genetics Research Unit and Division of Plant Sciences, Department of Agronomy, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA, FlyBase, Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EH, UK, Rat Genome Database, Human and Molecular Genetics Center, Medical College of Wisconsin, 8701 Watertown Plank Road, Milwaukee, WI 53226, USA, TAIR, Department of Plant Biology, Carnegie Institution for Science, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305, USA, Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Delaware, 15 Innovation Way, Newark, DE 19711, USA, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA, National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA.
³ WormBase, Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA, USDA-ARS Plant Genetics Research Unit and Division of Plant Sciences, Department of Agronomy, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA, FlyBase, Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EH, UK, Rat Genome Database, Human and Molecular Genetics Center, Medical College of Wisconsin, 8701 Watertown Plank Road, Milwaukee, WI 53226, USA, TAIR, Department of Plant Biology, Carnegie Institution for Science, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305, USA, Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Delaware, 15 Innovation Way, Newark, DE 19711, USA, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA, National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA zhiyong.lu@nih.gov.

Abstract

Gene function curation via Gene Ontology (GO) annotation is a common task among Model Organism Database groups. Owing to its manual nature, this task is considered one of the bottlenecks in literature curation. There have been many previous attempts at automatic identification of GO terms and supporting information from full text. However, few systems have delivered an accuracy that is comparable with humans. One recognized challenge in developing such systems is the lack of marked sentence-level evidence text that provides the basis for making GO annotations. We aim to create a corpus that includes the GO evidence text along with the three core elements of GO annotations: (i) a gene or gene product, (ii) a GO term and (iii) a GO evidence code. To ensure our results are consistent with real-life GO data, we recruited eight professional GO curators and asked them to follow their routine GO annotation protocols. Our annotators marked up more than 5000 text passages in 200 articles for 1356 distinct GO terms. For evidence sentence selection, the inter-annotator agreement (IAA) results are 9.3% (strict) and 42.7% (relaxed) in F1-measures. For GO term selection, the IAAs are 47% (strict) and 62.9% (hierarchical). Our corpus analysis further shows that abstracts contain ∼ 10% of relevant evidence sentences and 30% distinct GO terms, while the Results/Experiment section has nearly 60% relevant sentences and >70% GO terms. Further, of those evidence sentences found in abstracts, less than one-third contain enough experimental detail to fulfill the three core criteria of a GO annotation. This result demonstrates the need of using full-text articles for text mining GO annotations. Through its use at the BioCreative IV GO (BC4GO) task, we expect our corpus to become a valuable resource for the BioNLP research community. Database URL: http://www.biocreative.org/resources/corpora/bc-iv-go-task-corpus/.

Published by Oxford University Press 2014. This work is written by US Government employees and is in the public domain in the US.

Publication types

Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
Research Support, N.I.H., Intramural
Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

Computational Biology / methods
Data Mining / methods*
Databases, Genetic*
Humans
Molecular Sequence Annotation*
Software*
Vocabulary, Controlled*

Abstract

Publication types

MeSH terms

Grants and funding