title: Natural language processing in aid of FlyBase curators.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Despite increasing interest in applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) to biomedical text, whether this technology can facilitate tasks such as database curation remains unclear.
  
  
  RESULTS
  PaperBrowser is the first NLP-powered interface that was developed under a user-centered approach to improve the way in which FlyBase curators navigate an article. In this paper, we first discuss how observing curators at work informed the design and evaluation of PaperBrowser. Then, we present how we appraise PaperBrowser's navigational functionalities in a user-based study using a text highlighting task and evaluation criteria of Human-Computer Interaction. Our results show that PaperBrowser reduces the amount of interactions between two highlighting events and therefore improves navigational efficiency by about 58% compared to the navigational mechanism that was previously available to the curators. Moreover, PaperBrowser is shown to provide curators with enhanced navigational utility by over 74% irrespective of the different ways in which they highlight text in the article.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We show that state-of-the-art performance in certain NLP tasks such as Named Entity Recognition and Anaphora Resolution can be combined with the navigational functionalities of PaperBrowser to support curation quite successfully.
authors.affiliation: Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, William Gates Building, Cambridge, CB3 0FD, UK. nikiforos.karamanis@cl.cam.ac.uk
authors.forename: Nikiforos
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Karamanis
authors.forename: Ruth
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Seal
authors.forename: Ian
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Lewin
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: McQuilton
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Vlachos
authors.forename: Caroline
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Gasperin
authors.forename: Rachel
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Drysdale
authors.forename: Ted
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Briscoe
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003628:Database Management Systems; D016206:Databases, Bibliographic; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D012984:Software; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled