Hsinchun Chen

Xin Li, Hsinchun Chen, Zan Huang et al.

Gene/protein interactions provide critical information for a thorough understanding of cellular processes. Recently, considerable interest and effort has been focused on the construction and analysis of genome-wide gene networks. The large body of biomedical literature is an important source of gene/protein interaction information. Recent advances in text mining tools have made it possible to automatically extract such documented interactions from free-text literature. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework for constructing and analyzing large-scale gene functional networks based on the gene/protein interactions extracted from biomedical literature repositories using text mining tools. Our proposed framework consists of analyses of the network topology, network topology-gene function relationship, and temporal network evolution to distill valuable information embedded in the gene functional interactions in literature. We demonstrate the application of the proposed framework using a testbed of P53-related PubMed abstracts, which shows that literature-based P53 networks exhibit small-world and scale-free properties. We also found that high degree genes in the literature-based networks have a high probability of appearing in the manually curated database and genes in the same pathway tend to form local clusters in our literature-based networks. Temporal analysis showed that genes interacting with many other genes tend to be involved in a large number of newly discovered interactions.

Yizhi Liu, Fang Yu Lin, Mohammadreza Ebrahimi et al.

Internet users have been exposing an increasing amount of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on social media. Such exposed PII can cause severe losses to the users, and informing users of their PII exposure is crucial to raise their privacy awareness and encourage them to take protective measures. To this end, advanced automatic techniques are needed. While Information Extraction (IE) techniques can be used to extract the PII automatically, Deep Learning (DL)-based IE models alleviate the need for feature engineering and further improve the efficiency. However, DL-based IE models often require large-scale labeled data for training, but PII-labeled social media posts are difficult to obtain due to privacy concerns. Also, these models rely heavily on pre-trained word embeddings, while PII in social media often varies in forms and thus has no fixed representations in pre-trained word embeddings. In this study, we propose the Deep Transfer Learning for PII Extraction (DTL-PIIE) framework to address these two limitations. DTL-PIIE transfers knowledge learned from publicly available PII data to social media to address the problem of rare PII-labeled data. Moreover, our framework leverages Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to incorporate syntactic patterns to guide PIIE without relying on pre-trained word embeddings. Evaluation against benchmark IE models indicates that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art DL-based IE models. Our framework can facilitate various applications, such as PII misuse prediction and privacy risk assessment, protecting the privacy of internet users.

Tianjun Fu, Ahmed Abbasi, Daniel Zeng et al.

Despite the prevalence of sentiment-related content on the Web, there has been limited work on focused crawlers capable of effectively collecting such content. In this study, we evaluated the efficacy of using sentiment-related information for enhanced focused crawling of opinion-rich web content regarding a particular topic. We also assessed the impact of using sentiment-labeled web graphs to further improve collection accuracy. Experimental results on a large test bed encompassing over half a million web pages revealed that focused crawlers utilizing sentiment information as well as sentiment-labeled web graphs are capable of gathering more holistic collections of opinion-related content regarding a particular topic. The results have important implications for business and marketing intelligence gathering efforts in the Web 2.0 era.