We are pleased to announce the release of a new annotated corpus, consisting of 
selected sections (i.e., Abstract, Methods and Results) of scientific research 
articles concerning occupational exposures to two different types of substance, 
i.e.,  diesel exhaust (51 articles) and respirable crystalline silica (50 
articles).  The article sections have been annotated by experts in the field 
with 6 categories of named entities relevant to the assessment of occupational 
substance exposures, particularly in the context of Job Exposure Matrices.

The corpus and associated annotation guidelines may be downloaded from:  
https://zenodo.org/records/11164271

NER models and associated code are available at: 
https://github.com/panagiotis-geo/Substance_Exposure_NER/

The development of the corpus and the associated NER models are described in 
more detail in the following article:

Thompson, P., Ananiadou, S., Basinas I., Brinchmann, B. C., Cramer, C., Galea, 
K. S., Ge, C., Georgiadis, P., Kirkeleit, J., Kuijpers, E., Nguyen, N., Nuñez, 
R., Schlünssen, V., Stokholm, Z. A., Taher, E. A., Tinnerberg, H., Van 
Tongeren, M. and Xie, Q. (2024). <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307844> 
 Supporting the working life exposome: annotating occupational exposure for 
enhanced literature search. PLoS ONE 19(8): e030784 
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307844

Abstract
—————
An individual’s likelihood of developing non-communicable diseases is often 
influenced by the types, intensities and duration of exposures at work. Job 
exposure matrices provide exposure estimates associated with different 
occupations. However, due to their time-consuming expert curation process, job 
exposure matrices currently cover only a subset of possible workplace exposures 
and may not be regularly updated. Scientific literature articles describing 
exposure studies provide important supporting evidence for developing and 
updating job exposure matrices, since they report on exposures in a variety of 
occupational scenarios. However, the constant growth of scientific literature 
is increasing the challenges of efficiently identifying relevant articles and 
important content within them. Natural language processing methods emulate the 
human process of reading and understanding texts, but in a fraction of the 
time. Such methods can increase the efficiency of both finding relevant 
documents and pinpointing specific information within them, which could 
streamline the process of developing and updating job exposure matrices. Named 
entity recognition is a fundamental natural language processing method for 
language understanding, which automatically identifies mentions of 
domain-specific concepts (named entities) in documents, e.g., exposures, 
occupations and job tasks. State-of-the-art machine learning models typically 
use evidence from an annotated corpus, i.e., a set of documents in which named 
entities are manually marked up (annotated) by experts, to learn how to detect 
named entities automatically in new documents. We have developed a novel 
annotated corpus of scientific articles to support machine learning based named 
entity recognition relevant to occupational substance exposures. Through 
incremental refinements to the annotation process, we demonstrate that expert 
annotators can attain high levels of agreement, and that the corpus can be used 
to train high-performance named entity recognition models. The corpus thus 
constitutes an important foundation for the wider development of natural 
language processing tools to support the study of occupational exposures.







--

Paul Thompson
Research Fellow
Department of Computer Science
National Centre for Text Mining
Manchester Institute of Biotechnology
University of Manchester
131 Princess Street
Manchester
M1 7DN
UK
Tel: 0161 306 3091
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/Paul.Thompson/




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