An automated domain-independent text reading, interpreting and extracting approach for reviewing the scientific literature

It is presented here a machine learning-based (ML) natural language processing (NLP) approach capable to automatically recognize and extract categorical and numerical parameters from a corpus of articles. The approach (named a.RIX) operates with a concomitant/interchangeable use of ML models such as neuron networks (NNs), latent semantic analysis (LSA) and naive-Bayes classifiers (NBC), and a pattern recognition model using regular expression (REGEX). To demonstrate the efficiency of the a.RIX engine, it was processed a corpus of 7,873 scientific articles dealing with natural products (NPs). The engine automatically extracts categorical and numerical parameters such as (i) the plant species from which active molecules are extracted, (ii) the microorganisms species for which active molecules can act against, and (iii) the values of minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) against these microorganisms. The parameters are extracted without part-of-speech tagging (POS) and named entity recognition (NER) approaches (i.e. without the need of text annotation), and the models training is performed with unsupervised approaches. In this way, a.RIX can be essentially used on articles from any scientific field. Finally, it has a potential to make obsolete the currently used articles reviewing process in some areas, specially those in which texts structure, text semantics and latent knowledge is captured by machine learning models.