Abstract
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), around 60% of all outbreaks are detected using informal sources. In many public health institutes, including the WHO and the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), dedicated groups of public health agents sift through numerous articles and newsletters to detect relevant events. This media screening is one important part of event-based surveillance (EBS). Reading the articles, discussing their relevance, and putting key information into a database is a time-consuming process. To support EBS, but also to gain insights into what makes an article and the event it describes relevant, we developed a natural language processing framework for automated information extraction and relevance scoring. First, we scraped relevant sources for EBS as done at the RKI (WHO Disease Outbreak News and ProMED) and automatically extracted the articles’ key data:disease,country,date, andconfirmed-case count. For this, we performed named entity recognition in two steps: EpiTator, an open-source epidemiological annotation tool, suggested many different possibilities for each. We extracted the key country and disease using a heuristic with good results. We trained a naive Bayes classifier to find the key date and confirmed-case count, using the RKI’s EBS database as labels which performed modestly. Then, for relevance scoring, we defined two classes to which any article might belong: The article isrelevantif it is in the EBS database andirrelevantotherwise. We compared the performance of different classifiers, using bag-of-words, document and word embeddings. The best classifier, a logistic regression, achieved a sensitivity of 0.82 and an index balanced accuracy of 0.61. Finally, we integrated these functionalities into a web application calledEventEpiwhere relevant sources are automatically analyzed and put into a database. The user can also provide any URL or text, that will be analyzed in the same way and added to the database. Each of these steps could be improved, in particular with larger labeled datasets and fine-tuning of the learning algorithms. The overall framework, however, works already well and can be used in production, promising improvements in EBS. The source code and data are publicly available under open licenses.
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subject
Computational Theory and Mathematics,Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience,Genetics,Molecular Biology,Ecology,Modelling and Simulation,Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Reference49 articles.
1. WHO. Epidemiology; 2014. Available from: https://www.who.int/topics/epidemiology/en/.
2. WHO. Early detection, assessment and response to acute public health events. WHO. 2014.
3. Effect of temperature and precipitation on salmonellosis cases in South-East Queensland, Australia: an observational study;DM Stephen;BMJ Open,2016
4. The Impact of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Interventions to Control Cholera: A Systematic Review;DL Taylor;PLOS ONE,2015
5. What is epidemic intelligence, and how is it being improved in Europe?;R Kaiser;Euro Surveillance,2006
Cited by
11 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献