Citation-based extraction of core contents from biomedical articles

Abstract

Retrieval of biomedical articles about specific research issues (e.g., gene-disease associations) is an essential and routine job for biomedical researchers. An article a can be said to be about a research issue r only if its core content (goal, background, and conclusion of a) focuses on r. In this paper, we present a technique CoreCE (Core Content Extractor) that, given a biomedical article a, extracts the textual core content of a. The core contents extracted from biomedical articles can be used to index the articles so that articles about specific research issues can be retrieved by search engines more properly. Development of CoreCE is challenging, because the core content of an article a may be expressed in different ways and scattered in a. We tackle the challenge by considering titles of the references cited by a, as well as the passages (in a) used to explain why the references are cited (i.e., the citation passages). Empirical evaluation shows that, by representing biomedical articles with the core contents extracted by CoreCE, retrieval of those articles that are judged (by biomedical experts) to be about specific gene-disease associations can be significantly improved. CoreCE can thus be a front-end processor for search engines to preprocess biomedical scholarly articles for subsequent indexing and retrieval. The contribution is of technical significance to the retrieval and mining of the evidence already published in biomedical literature.