Quick start guide

In goldi: Gene Ontology Label Discernment and Identification

Overview

goldi is a tool for identifying key terms in text. It has been developed with the intention of identifying ontological labels in free form text with specific application to finding Gene Ontology terms in the biomedical literature with strict canonical NLP quality control.

Installation

goldi is not currently on CRAN, though submission is planned. You can install the stable, master branch with:

devtools::install_github("Chris1221/goldi")

For those who don't mind seeing error messages, you can also install the development version with:

devtools::install_github("Chris1221/goldi", ref = "devel")

Minimal Example

goldi attempts to identify terms in free text through semantic similarity. This means that if a term and a sentence share a high number of words, the sentence has a higher probability of talking about the term.

Given the following input text and the included pre-computed term document matrix for approximately 10,000 Gene Onotlogy molecular function terms, we can find which are discussed in our text.

```{R, eval = F}

Give the free form text

doc <- "In this sentence we will talk about ribosomal chaperone activity. In this sentence we will talk about nothing. Here we discuss obsolete molecular terms."

Load in the included term document matrix for the terms

data("TDM.go.df")

Pipe output and log to /dev/null

output = "/dev/null" log = "/dev/null"

Run the function

goldi(doc = doc, term_tdm = TDM.go.df, output = output, log = log, object = TRUE) ```

Note in the above example, we impliment a few other options. Firstly, we don't want to see the output or the log for this example, so we pipe them to /dev/null. Secondly, we would like to return the output as an R object instead of writing it to a file, so we specify object = TRUE.

This will output the following table:

| Term | Context | | ---------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------- | | ribosomal_chaperone_activity | In this sentence we will talk about ribosomal chaperone activity |

This will give the term identified and the context in the free form where it was identified. This table will form the basis for all further analysis.

FAQ

Q: This is all really confusing, where can I read more about this package?

A: Please see the pre print of our paper.

Q: How does goldi match terms to sentences?

A: goldi accomplishes this by finding the number of similar words in a term and in a sentence, comparing this to a user defined acceptance function A(n) based on the length of the term n. The default function is given by the following: $$ \mathcal{A}(n) = \begin{cases} n, & 1 < n \leq 4 \ n-1, & 5 < n \leq 8 \ n-2, & 9 < n \leq 10 \ 10, & n > 10 \end{cases} $$ This may be represented as a vector in R lims <- c(1,2,3,3,4,5,6,6,7,8,9) If the number of words present equals or exceeds this function, then a match is declared. You are encouraged to play around and find what acceptance function works for you.

Q: What if I don't have my text in R, but instead as a text or PDF file?

A: goldi has four distinct methods for importing text locally, please see the wiki article on the subject.

Q: When I install the package, I get messages about libc or gcc versions. What's happening?

A: The most likely scenario is that your gcc compiler (which compiles the c++ code) is out of date, espcially if you are on an older version of linux distribution like CentOS on some cluster systems. Contact your system administrator and try to update gcc.

Q: How can I work with abstracts from pubmed?

A: We recommend the RISmed package.

Q: Where can I see some examples of this package in use?

A: Please see the included vignettes, especially the overexpression analysis implimented in the paper.

Q: Nothing is working, who can I complain to?

A: Please raise an issue on this repository, that's most likely to get answered.

goldi documentation built on May 2, 2019, 3:43 a.m.