Information extraction for enhanced access to disease outbreak reports

Document search is generally based on individual terms in the document. However, for collections within limited domains it is possible to provide more powerful access tools. This paper describes a system designed for collections of reports of infectious disease outbreaks. The system, Proteus-BIO, automatically creates a table of outbreaks, with each table entry linked to the document describing that outbreak; this makes it possible to use database operations such as selection and sorting to find relevant documents. Proteus-BIO consists of a Web crawler which gathers relevant documents; an information extraction engine which converts the individual outbreak events to a tabular database; and a database browser which provides access to the events and, through them, to the documents. The information extraction engine uses sets of patterns and word classes to extract the information about each event. Preparing these patterns and word classes has been a time-consuming manual operation in th...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: JBI
• Authors: Ralph Grishman, Silja Huttunen, Roman Yangarber
• Keywords: Bioinformatics, Documents, Information Extraction Engine, JBI 2002, Relevant Documents