Objective Based on text mining techniques,we design a system which automatically extracts epidemiologic risk factors. Methods The system consists of a text mining engine subsystem and a rule-based information extraction subsystem. First,all the noun phrases are identified by the text mining engine subsystem and the information are collected. Then,the epidemiologic risk factors are identified by the text classifier system based on rules. Results The evaluation of the system using text annotated by an epidemiologist shows the highest F-measure of 64.6%(Precision 61.0% and Recall 68.8%),with certain avoidable mistakes. Conclusions This method is helpful for the automatic extraction of risk factors in the epidemiologic literatures.
|