Sentence retrieval for abstracts of randomized controlled trials.
Background: The practice of evidence-based medicine (EBM) requires clinicians to integrate their expertise with the latest scientific research. But this is becoming increasingly difficult with the growing numbers of published articles. There is a clear need for better tools to improve clinician's ab...
| Published in: | BMC Medical Informatics & Decision Making Vol. 9; no. 1; pp. 10 - 11 |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | research Journal Article |
| Published: |
BioMed Central
2009
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=105531072&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ccm uiTerm: 105531072 longDbName: CINAHL Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: dissinfo: jinfo: jid: 14726947 1CI0 jtl: BMC Medical Informatics & Decision Making issn: 14726947 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: 2009 vid: 9 iid: 1 pid: 24147 pub: BioMed Central artinfo: ui: 105531072 NLM19208256 2010274590 10.1186/1472-6947-9-10 NLM19208256 PMC2657779 105531072 ppf: 10 ppct: 1 formats: tig: atl: Sentence retrieval for abstracts of randomized controlled trials. aug: au: Chung GY Chung, Grace Y affil: Centre for Health Informatics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia sug: subj: Abstracting and Indexing Clinical Trials Classification Information Retrieval Methods Natural Language Processing Human ab: Background: The practice of evidence-based medicine (EBM) requires clinicians to integrate their expertise with the latest scientific research. But this is becoming increasingly difficult with the growing numbers of published articles. There is a clear need for better tools to improve clinician's ability to search the primary literature. Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) are the most reliable source of evidence documenting the efficacy of treatment options. This paper describes the retrieval of key sentences from abstracts of RCTs as a step towards helping users find relevant facts about the experimental design of clinical studies.Method: Using Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), a popular and successful method for natural language processing problems, sentences referring to Intervention, Participants and Outcome Measures are automatically categorized. This is done by extending a previous approach for labeling sentences in an abstract for general categories associated with scientific argumentation or rhetorical roles: Aim, Method, Results and Conclusion. Methods are tested on several corpora of RCT abstracts. First structured abstracts with headings specifically indicating Intervention, Participant and Outcome Measures are used. Also a manually annotated corpus of structured and unstructured abstracts is prepared for testing a classifier that identifies sentences belonging to each category.Results: Using CRFs, sentences can be labeled for the four rhetorical roles with F-scores from 0.93-0.98. This outperforms the use of Support Vector Machines. Furthermore, sentences can be automatically labeled for Intervention, Participant and Outcome Measures, in unstructured and structured abstracts where the section headings do not specifically indicate these three topics. F-scores of up to 0.83 and 0.84 are obtained for Intervention and Outcome Measure sentences.Conclusion: Results indicate that some of the methodological elements of RCTs are identifiable at the sentence level in both structured and unstructured abstract reports. This is promising in that sentences labeled automatically could potentially form concise summaries, assist in information retrieval and finer-grained extraction. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: research Journal Article ougenre: Article language: English refInfo: holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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