Natural Language Processing in aid of FlyBase curators

Background: Despite increasing interest in applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) to biomedical text, whether this technology can facilitate tasks such as database curation remains unclear. Results: PaperBrowser is the first NLP-powered interface that was developed under a usercentered approach to improve the way in which FlyBase curators navigate an article. In this paper, we first discuss how observing curators at work informed the design and evaluation of PaperBrowser. Then, we present how we appraise PaperBrowser's navigational functionalities in a user-based study using a text highlighting task and evaluation criteria of Human-Computer Interaction. Our results show that PaperBrowser reduces the amount of interactions between two highlighting events and therefore improves navigational efficiency by about 58% compared to the navigational mechanism that was previously available to the curators. Moreover, PaperBrowser is shown to provide curators with enhanced navigational u...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Nikiforos Karamanis, Ruth Seal, Ian Lewin, Peter McQuilton, Andreas Vlachos, Caroline Gasperin, Rachel A. Drysdale, Ted Briscoe
• Keywords: BMCBI 2008, Curators, Navigational, Navigational Functionalities