Timing, hosts and locations of (grouped) events of NanoImpactNet

NanoSafetyCluster - Compendium 2012
6 Work performed and Results
Following is a detailed description of two important components
of NHECD, Information Extraction and NHECD User Interface.
These components synthesize the investment of all NHECD work-
packages and are reviewed in detail. The detailed description of
the other components was given in previous publications.
6.1 Information Extraction
Information Extraction (IE) is a type of information retrieval whose
goal is to automatically extract structured information from
unstructured and/or semi-structured machine-readable
documents. In most cases, this activity concerns processing natural
language texts using NLP. Information extraction has numerous
potential applications. For example, information available as
unstructured text can be transformed into traditional databases
that users can probe through standard queries.
6.1.1 IE system flow
The IE component is built in a modular linear flow. Each module
can work independently. If needed, any of the modules can be
separately changed.
6.1.2 The process
Figure 1 -IE System Flow
The aim of NHECD IE component is to extract, from every scientific
paper gathered by the NHECD crawler, a comprehensive, full and
precise list of relations. NHECD text mining tasks are in fact
information extraction tasks, namely, to extract entities and
relations (which are, by nature, structured information) from
unstructured Nanoparticle-toxicity related documents. The
information extraction system expected results include the
following entities or relations: (1) Nano particle, (2) Model – Cell
model or animal, (3) Attributes – NP size, Zeta potential, animal
age, etc. and (4) Experiment attributes – mode of exposure,
measurement assay etc.
See the following example of the information extraction task.
The examined text:
Under phase-contrast microscope, HT-1080
cells (control) appeared polyhydric or stellate
showing slender lamellar expansions (Fig. 1A) that
joined neighboring cells. With increasing
concentration of SNP (from 6.25 to 50 µ g/mL ), cells
were seen as less polyhydric; and more fusiform,
shrunken and rounded.
The results of XTT assays (Fig. 3) showed a dosedependent
cytotoxicity for both the cell types with
IC50 values of SNP working out as 10.6 and 11.6
µg/mL for HT-1080 and A431 cells, respectively
Figure 2- IE examined text
Should result in the extraction of the following relations:
Figure 3- IE relations result
6.2 The NHECD User Interface
The NHECD user interface offers different possibilities to retrieve
efficiently knowledge on the health, safety and environmental
impact of nanoparticles.
• A BASIC SEARCH interface to perform keyword and/or
taxonomy based queries.
• An ADVANCED SEARCH interface for experienced users to
extend the capabilities of the basic search using
advanced search features such as logical operators (AND,
OR, NOT), as well as allowing to search through extended
metadata.
• The INTELLIGENT SEARCH is a unique method especially
adapted to the needs of researchers in the nano-science
field. This feature includes, among other capabilities, the
power to search by model, experiment and nanoparticles
attributes. The target is the exact data taken from the
results of all experiments described in the corpus (shown
in figure 4).
238 Compendium of Projects in the European NanoSafety Cluster