title: MeSHLabeler: improving the accuracy of large-scale MeSH indexing by integrating diverse evidence.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Medical Subject Headings (MeSHs) are used by National Library of Medicine (NLM) to index almost all citations in MEDLINE, which greatly facilitates the applications of biomedical information retrieval and text mining. To reduce the time and financial cost of manual annotation, NLM has developed a software package, Medical Text Indexer (MTI), for assisting MeSH annotation, which uses k-nearest neighbors (KNN), pattern matching and indexing rules. Other types of information, such as prediction by MeSH classifiers (trained separately), can also be used for automatic MeSH annotation. However, existing methods cannot effectively integrate multiple evidence for MeSH annotation.
  
  
  METHODS
  We propose a novel framework, MeSHLabeler, to integrate multiple evidence for accurate MeSH annotation by using 'learning to rank'. Evidence includes numerous predictions from MeSH classifiers, KNN, pattern matching, MTI and the correlation between different MeSH terms, etc. Each MeSH classifier is trained independently, and thus prediction scores from different classifiers are incomparable. To address this issue, we have developed an effective score normalization procedure to improve the prediction accuracy.
  
  
  RESULTS
  MeSHLabeler won the first place in Task 2A of 2014 BioASQ challenge, achieving the Micro F-measure of 0.6248 for 9,040 citations provided by the BioASQ challenge. Note that this accuracy is around 9.15% higher than 0.5724, obtained by MTI.
  
  
  METHODS
  The software is available upon request.
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, School of Information Science & Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA, Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Uji 611-0011, Japan and Center for Computational System Biology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China School of Computer Science and Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, School of Information Science & Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA, Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Uji 611-0011, Japan and Center for Computational System Biology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China.
authors.forename: Ke
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, School of Information Science & Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA, Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Uji 611-0011, Japan and Center for Computational System Biology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China School of Computer Science and Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, School of Information Science & Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA, Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Uji 611-0011, Japan and Center for Computational System Biology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China.
authors.forename: Shengwen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Peng
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, School of Information Science & Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA, Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Uji 611-0011, Japan and Center for Computational System Biology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China.
authors.forename: Junqiu
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, School of Information Science & Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA, Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Uji 611-0011, Japan and Center for Computational System Biology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China.
authors.forename: Chengxiang
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zhai
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, School of Information Science & Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA, Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Uji 611-0011, Japan and Center for Computational System Biology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China.
authors.forename: Hiroshi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Mamitsuka
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, School of Information Science & Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA, Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Uji 611-0011, Japan and Center for Computational System Biology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China School of Computer Science and Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, School of Information Science & Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA, Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Uji 611-0011, Japan and Center for Computational System Biology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China School of Computer Science and Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, School of Information Science & Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA, Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Uji 611-0011, Japan and Center for Computational System Biology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China.
authors.forename: Shanfeng
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zhu
mesh_terms: D000043:Abstracting and Indexing / Q000379:methods*; D000465:Algorithms; D057225:Data Mining; D016239:MEDLINE; D046650:Medical Subject Headings; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012984:Software