OBJECTIVE: The aim of the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (#SMM4H) shared tasks is to take a community-driven approach to address the natural language processing and machine learning challenges inherent to utilizing social media data for health informatics. In this paper, we present the annotated corpora, a technical summary of participants' systems, and the performance results. METHODS: The eighth iteration of the #SMM4H shared tasks was hosted at the AMIA 2023 Annual Symposium and consisted of 5 tasks that represented various social media platforms (Twitter and Reddit), languages (English and Spanish), methods (binary classification, multi-class classification, extraction, and normalization), and topics (COVID-19, therapies, social anxiety disorder, and adverse drug events). RESULTS: In total, 29 teams registered, representing 17 countries. In general, the top-performing systems used deep neural network architectures based on pre-trained transformer models. In particular, the top-performing systems for the classification tasks were based on single models that were pre-trained on social media corpora. CONCLUSION: To facilitate future work, the datasets-a total of 61 353 posts-will remain available by request, and the CodaLab sites will remain active for a post-evaluation phase.

Abstract Email is the primary method of communication with authors of scientific publications. This study sought to measure the reliability, over time, of contact email addresses from biomedical publications, particularly depending on email type. Emails were written to randomly selected email addresses from publications in MEDLINE, and email bounce rates were modeled probabilistically. The use of personal email addresses was quantified and compared to the use of other types of email addresses. Eighteen percent of authors' contact email addresses in MEDLINE were estimated to be invalid. A steadily growing share of email addresses was personal: 32% of all new email addresses in MEDLINE in 2018 were of this kind. These email addresses were less likely to be invalid than email addresses from other types of providers. While the percentage of invalid email addresses was significant, it was lower than previously estimated. Personal email addresses are taking an increasingly more important role by supplying more reliable email addresses to scientists. To mitigate the problem of invalid email addresses, institutions should provide email forwarding, scientific directories should offer the possibility of contacting authors, or scientific authors should use more stable email addresses.

BACKGROUND: Numerous efforts have been poured into annotating the wealth of knowledge contained in biomedical articles. Thanks to such efforts, it is now possible to quantitatively explore relations between these annotations and the citation network at large scale. RESULTS: With the aid of several large and small annotation databases, this study shows that articles share annotations with their citation neighborhood to the point that the neighborhood's most common annotations are likely to be those appearing in the article. CONCLUSIONS: These findings posit that an article's citation neighborhood defines to a large extent the article's annotated content. Thus, citations should be considered as a foundation for future knowledge management and annotation of biomedical articles.

MOTIVATION: Name ambiguity has long been a central problem in biomedical text mining. To tackle it, it has been usually assumed that names present only one meaning within a given text. It is not known whether this assumption applies beyond the scope of single documents. RESULTS: Using a new method that leverages large numbers of biomedical annotations and normalized citations, this study shows that ambiguous biomedical names mentioned in scientific articles tend to present the same meaning in articles that cite them or that they cite, and, to a lesser extent, two steps away in the citation network. Citations, therefore, can be regarded as semantic connections between articles and the citation network should be considered for tasks such as automatic name disambiguation, entity linking and biomedical database annotation. A simple experiment shows the applicability of these findings to name disambiguation. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The code used for this analysis is available at: https://github.com/raroes/one-sense-per-citation-network.

OBJECTIVE: Author-centric analyses of fast-growing biomedical reference databases are challenging due to author ambiguity. This problem has been mainly addressed through author disambiguation using supervised machine-learning algorithms. Such algorithms, however, require adequately designed gold standards that reflect the reference database properly. In this study we used MEDLINE to build the first unbiased gold standard in a reference database and improve over the existing state of the art in author disambiguation. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Following a new corpus design method, publication pairs randomly picked from MEDLINE were evaluated by both crowdsourcing and expert curators. Because the latter showed higher accuracy than crowdsourcing, expert curators were tasked to create a full corpus. The corpus was then used to explore new features that could improve state-of-the-art author disambiguation algorithms that would not have been discoverable with previously existing gold standards. RESULTS: We created a gold standard based on 1900 publication pairs that shows close similarity to MEDLINE in terms of chronological distribution and information completeness. A machine-learning algorithm that includes new features related to the ethnic origin of authors showed significant improvements over the current state of the art and demonstrates the necessity of realistic gold standards to further develop effective author disambiguation algorithms. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: An unbiased gold standard can give a more accurate picture of the status of author disambiguation research and help in the discovery of new features for machine learning. The principles and methods shown here can be applied to other reference databases beyond MEDLINE. The gold standard and code used for this study are available at the following repository: https://github.com/amorgani/AND/.

Drugs are often seen as ancillary to the purpose of fighting diseases. Here an alternative view is proposed in which they occupy a spearheading role. In this view, drugs are technologies with an inherent therapeutic potential. Once created, they can spread from disease to disease independently of the drug creator's original intentions. Through the analysis of extensive literature and clinical trial records, it can be observed that successful drugs follow a life cycle in which they are studied at an increasing rate, and for the treatment of an increasing number of diseases, leading to clinical advancement. Such initial growth, following a power law on average, has a degree of momentum, but eventually decelerates, leading to stagnation and decay. A network model can describe the propagation of drugs from disease to disease in which diseases communicate with each other by receiving and sending drugs. Within this model, some diseases appear more prone to influence other diseases than be influenced, and vice versa. Diseases can also be organized into a drug-centric disease taxonomy based on the drugs that each adopts. This taxonomy reflects not only biological similarities across diseases, but also the level of differentiation of existing therapies. In sum, this study shows that drugs can become contagious technologies playing a driving role in the fight against disease. By better understanding such dynamics, pharmaceutical developers may be able to manage drug projects more effectively.

Text mining services are rapidly becoming a crucial component of various knowledge management pipelines, for example in the process of database curation, or for exploration and enrichment of biomedical data within the pharmaceutical industry. Traditional architectures, based on monolithic applications, do not offer sufficient flexibility for a wide range of use case scenarios, and therefore open architectures, as provided by web services, are attracting increased interest. We present an approach towards providing advanced text mining capabilities through web services, using a recently proposed standard for textual data interchange (BioC). The web services leverage a state-of-the-art platform for text mining (OntoGene) which has been tested in several community-organized evaluation challenges,with top ranked results in several of them.

MOTIVATION: A crucial phenomenon of our times is the diminishing marginal returns of investments in pharmaceutical research and development. A potential reason is that research into diseases is becoming increasingly complex, and thus more burdensome, for humans to handle. We sought to investigate whether we could measure research complexity by analyzing the published literature. RESULTS: Through the text mining of the publication record of multiple diseases, we have found that the complexity and novelty of disease research has been increasing over the years. Surprisingly, we have also found that research on diseases with higher publication rate does not possess greater complexity or novelty than that on less-studied diseases. We have also shown that the research produced about a disease can be seen as a differentiated area of knowledge within the wider biomedical research. For our analysis, we have conceptualized disease research as a parallel multi-agent search in which each scientific agent (a scientist) follows a search path based on a model of a disease. We have looked at trends in facts published for diseases, measured their diversity and turnover using the entropy measure and found similar patterns across disease areas. CONTACT: [email protected].

MOTIVATION: Figures from biomedical articles contain valuable information difficult to reach without specialized tools. Currently, there is no search engine that can retrieve specific figure types. RESULTS: This study describes a retrieval method that takes advantage of principles in image understanding, text mining and optical character recognition (OCR) to retrieve figure types defined conceptually. A search engine was developed to retrieve tables and figure types to aid computational and experimental research. AVAILABILITY: http://iossifovlab.cshl.edu/figurome/.

We have generated and made publicly available two very large networks of molecular interactions: 49,493 mouse-specific and 52,518 human-specific interactions. These networks were generated through automated analysis of 368,331 full-text research articles and 8,039,972 article abstracts from the PubMed database, using the GeneWays system. Our networks cover a wide spectrum of molecular interactions, such as bind, phosphorylate, glycosylate, and activate; 207 of these interaction types occur more than 1,000 times in our unfiltered, multi-species data set. Because mouse and human genes are linked through an orthological relationship, human and mouse networks are amenable to straightforward, joint computational analysis. Using our newly generated networks and known associations between mouse genes and cerebellar malformation phenotypes, we predicted a number of new associations between genes and five cerebellar phenotypes (small cerebellum, absent cerebellum, cerebellar degeneration, abnormal foliation, and abnormal vermis). Using a battery of statistical tests, we showed that genes that are associated with cerebellar phenotypes tend to form compact network clusters. Further, we observed that cerebellar malformation phenotypes tend to be associated with highly connected genes. This tendency was stronger for developmental phenotypes and weaker for cerebellar degeneration.

This tutorial is intended for biologists and computational biologists interested in adding text mining tools to their bioinformatics toolbox. As an illustrative example, the tutorial examines the relationship between progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) and antibodies. Recent cases of PML have been associated to the administration of some monoclonal antibodies such as efalizumab [1]. Those interested in a further introduction to text mining may also want to read other reviews [2]–[4]. Understanding large amounts of text with the aid of a computer is harder than simply equipping a computer with a grammar and a dictionary. A computer, like a human, needs certain specialized knowledge in order to understand text. The scientific field that is dedicated to train computers with the right knowledge for this task (among other tasks) is called natural language processing (NLP). Biomedical text mining (henceforth, text mining) is the subfield that deals with text that comes from biology, medicine, and chemistry (henceforth, biomedical text). Another popular name is BioNLP, which some practitioners use as synonymous with text mining. Biomedical text is not a homogeneous realm [5]. Medical records are written differently from scientific articles, sequence annotations, or public health guidelines. Moreover, local dialects are not uncommon [6]. For example, medical centers develop their own jargons and laboratories create their idiosyncratic protein nomenclatures. This variability means, in practice, that text mining applications are tailored to specific types of text. In particular, for reasons of availability and cost, many are designed for scientific abstracts in English from Medline.

Text-mining algorithms make mistakes in extracting facts from natural-language texts. In biomedical applications, which rely on use of text-mined data, it is critical to assess the quality (the probability that the message is correctly extracted) of individual facts--to resolve data conflicts and inconsistencies. Using a large set of almost 100,000 manually produced evaluations (most facts were independently reviewed more than once, producing independent evaluations), we implemented and tested a collection of algorithms that mimic human evaluation of facts provided by an automated information-extraction system. The performance of our best automated classifiers closely approached that of our human evaluators (ROC score close to 0.95). Our hypothesis is that, were we to use a larger number of human experts to evaluate any given sentence, we could implement an artificial-intelligence curator that would perform the classification job at least as accurately as an average individual human evaluator. We illustrated our analysis by visualizing the predicted accuracy of the text-mined relations involving the term cocaine.