Biomedical Text NER Tagging Tool with Web Interface for Generating BERT-Based Fine-Tuning Dataset

Abstract

In this paper, a tagging tool is developed to streamline the process of locating tags for each term and manually selecting the target term. It directly extracts the terms to be tagged from sentences and displays it to the user. It also increases tagging efficiency by allowing users to reflect candidate categories in untagged terms. It is based on annotations automatically generated using machine learning. Subsequently, this architecture is fine-tuned using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to enable the tagging of terms that cannot be captured using Named-Entity Recognition (NER). The tagged text data extracted using the proposed tagging tool can be used as an additional training dataset. The tagging tool, which receives and saves new NE annotation input online, is added to the NER and RE web interfaces using BERT. Annotation information downloaded by the user includes the category (e.g., diseases, genes/proteins) and the list of words associated to the named entity selected by the user. The results reveal that the RE and NER results are improved using the proposed web service by collecting more NE annotation data and fine-tuning the model using generated datasets. Our application programming interfaces and demonstrations are available to the public at via the website link provided in this paper.