PubMed Text Similarity Model and its application to curation efforts in the Conserved Domain Database

This study proposes a text similarity model to help biocuration efforts of the Conserved Domain Database (CDD). CDD is a curated resource that catalogs annotated multiple sequence alignment models for ancient domains and full-length proteins. These models allow for fast searching and quick identification of conserved motifs in protein sequences via Reverse PSI-BLAST. In addition, CDD curators prepare summaries detailing the function of these conserved domains and specific protein families, based on published peer-reviewed articles. To facilitate information access for database users, it is desirable to specifically identify the referenced articles that support the assertions of curator-composed sentences. Moreover, CDD curators desire an alert system that scans the newly published literature and proposes related articles of relevance to the existing CDD records. Our approach to address these needs is a text similarity method that automatically maps a curator-written statement to candidate sentences extracted from the list of referenced articles, as well as the articles in the PubMed Central database. To evaluate this proposal, we paired CDD description sentences with the top 10 matching sentences from the literature, which were given to curators for review. Through this exercise, we discovered that we were able to map the articles in the reference list to the CDD description statements with an accuracy of 77%. In the dataset that was reviewed by curators, we were able to succ...
Source: Database : The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation - Category: Databases & Libraries Source Type: research