Tables are a popular and efficient means of presenting structured information. They are used extensively in various kinds of documents including web pages. Tables display information as a two-dimensional matrix, the semantics of which is conveyed by a mixture of structure (rows, columns), headers, caption, and content. Recent research has started to consider tables as first class objects, not just as an addendum to texts, yielding interesting results for problems like table matching, table completion, or value imputation. All of these problems inherently rely on an accurate measure for the semantic similarity of two tables. We present TabSim, a novel method to compute table similarity scores using deep neural networks. Conceptually, TabSim represents a table as a learned concatenation of embeddings of its caption, its content, and its structure. Given two tables in this representation, a Siamese neural network is trained to compute a score correlating with the tables' semantic similarity. To train and evaluate our method, we created a gold standard corpus consisting of 1500 table pairs extracted from biomedical articles and manually scored regarding their degree of similarity, and adopted two other corpora originally developed for a different yet similar task. Our evaluation shows that TabSim outperforms other table similarity measures on average by app. 7% pp F1-score in a binary similarity classification setting and by app. 1.5% pp in a ranking scenario. The codes and resources introduced here are available at https://github.com/Marhabibi/TabSim.

Abstract Tables are a common way to present information in an intuitive and concise manner. They are used extensively in media such as scientific articles or web pages. Automatically analyzing the content of tables bears special challenges. One of the most basic tasks is determination of the orientation of a table: In column tables, columns represent one entity with the different attribute values present in the different rows; row tables are vice versa, and matrix tables give information on pairs of entities. In this paper, we address the problem of classifying a given table into one of the three layouts horizontal (for row tables), vertical (for column tables), and matrix. We describe DeepTable, a novel method based on deep neural networks designed for learning from sets. Contrary to previous state-of-the-art methods, this basis makes DeepTable invariant to the permutation of rows or columns, which is a highly desirable property as in most tables the order of rows and columns does not carry specific information. We evaluate our method using a silver standard corpus of 5500 tables extracted from biomedical articles where the layout was determined heuristically. DeepTable outperforms previous methods in both precision and recall on our corpus. In a second evaluation, we manually labeled a corpus of 300 tables and were able to confirm DeepTable to reach superior performance in the table layout classification task. The codes and resources introduced here are available at https://github.com/Marhabibi/DeepTable .

BACKGROUND: Diagnosis and treatment decisions in cancer increasingly depend on a detailed analysis of the mutational status of a patient's genome. This analysis relies on previously published information regarding the association of variations to disease progression and possible interventions. Clinicians to a large degree use biomedical search engines to obtain such information; however, the vast majority of scientific publications focus on basic science and have no direct clinical impact. We develop the Variant-Information Search Tool (VIST), a search engine designed for the targeted search of clinically relevant publications given an oncological mutation profile. RESULTS: VIST indexes all PubMed abstracts and content from ClinicalTrials.gov. It applies advanced text mining to identify mentions of genes, variants and drugs and uses machine learning based scoring to judge the clinical relevance of indexed abstracts. Its functionality is available through a fast and intuitive web interface. We perform several evaluations, showing that VIST's ranking is superior to that of PubMed or a pure vector space model with regard to the clinical relevance of a document's content. CONCLUSION: Different user groups search repositories of scientific publications with different intentions. This diversity is not adequately reflected in the standard search engines, often leading to poor performance in specialized settings. We develop a search engine for the specific case of finding documents that are clinically relevant in the course of cancer treatment. We believe that the architecture of our engine, heavily relying on machine learning algorithms, can also act as a blueprint for search engines in other, equally specific domains. VIST is freely available at https://vist.informatik.hu-berlin.de/.

Scientific workflows have become a valuable tool for large-scale data processing and analysis. This has led to the creation of specialized online repositories to facilitate workflow sharing and reuse. Over time, these repositories have grown to sizes that call for advanced methods to support workflow discovery, in particular for effective similarity search. Here, we present a novel and intuitive workflow similarity measure that is based on layer decomposition. Layer decomposition accounts for the directed dataflow underlying scientific workflows, a property which has not been adequately considered in previous methods. We comparatively evaluate our algorithm using a gold standard for 24 query workflows from a repository of almost 1500 scientific workflows, and show that it a) delivers the best results for similarity search, b) has a much lower runtime than other, often highly complex competitors in structure-aware workflow comparison, and c) can be stacked easily with even faster, structure-agnostic approaches to further reduce runtime while retaining result quality.

With the increasing popularity of scientific workflows, public repositories are gaining importance as a means to share, find, and reuse such workflows. As the sizes of these repositories grow, methods to compare the scientific workflows stored in them become a necessity, for instance, to allow duplicate detection or similarity search. Scientific workflows are complex objects, and their comparison entails a number of distinct steps from comparing atomic elements to comparison of the workflows as a whole. Various studies have implemented methods for scientific workflow comparison and came up with often contradicting conclusions upon which algorithms work best. Comparing these results is cumbersome, as the original studies mixed different approaches for different steps and used different evaluation data and metrics. We contribute to the field (i) by disecting each previous approach into an explicitly defined and comparable set of subtasks, (ii) by comparing in isolation different approaches taken at each step of scientific workflow comparison, reporting on an number of unexpected findings, (iii) by investigating how these can best be combined into aggregated measures, and (iv) by making available a gold standard of over 2000 similarity ratings contributed by 15 workflow experts on a corpus of almost 1500 workflows and re-implementations of all methods we evaluated.

Until recently, genomics has concentrated on comparing sequences between species. However, due to the sharply falling cost of sequencing technology, studies of populations of individuals of the same species are now feasible and promise advances in areas such as personalized medicine and treatment of genetic diseases. A core operation in such studies is read mapping, i.e., finding all parts of a set of genomes which are within edit distance k to a given query sequence ( k -approximate search). To achieve sufficient speed, current algorithms solve this problem only for one to-be-searched genome and compute only approximate solutions, i.e., they miss some k - approximate occurrences. We present RCSI, Referentially Compressed Search Index, which scales to a thousand genomes and computes the exact answer. It exploits the fact that genomes of different individuals of the same species are highly similar by first compressing the to-be-searched genomes with respect to a reference genome. Given a query, RCSI then searches the reference and all genome-specific individual differences. We propose efficient data structures for representing compressed genomes and present algorithms for scalable compression and similarity search. We evaluate our algorithms on a set of 1092 human genomes, which amount to approx. 3 TB of raw data. RCSI compresses this set by a ratio of 450:1 (26:1 including the search index) and answers similarity queries on a mid-class server in 15 ms on average even for comparably large error thresholds, thereby significantly outperforming other methods. Furthermore, we present a fast and adaptive heuristic for choosing the best reference sequence for referential compression, a problem that was never studied before at this scale.