Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
BACKGROUND: Automated surveillance of the Internet provides a timely and sensitive method for alerting on global emerging infectious disease threats. HealthMap is part of a new generation of online systems designed to monitor and visualize, on a real-time basis, disease outbreak alerts as reported by online news media and public health sources. HealthMap is of specific interest for national and international public health organizations and international travelers. A particular task that makes such a surveillance useful is the automated discovery of the geographic references contained in the retrieved outbreak alerts. This task is sometimes referred to as "geo-parsing". A typical approach to geo-parsing would demand an expensive training corpus of alerts manually tagged by a human. RESULTS: Given that human readers perform this kind of task by using both their lexical and contextual knowledge, we developed an approach which relies on a relatively small expert-built gazetteer, thus limiting the need of human input, but focuses on learning the context in which geographic references appear. We show in a set of experiments, that this approach exhibits a substantial capacity to discover geographic locations outside of its initial lexicon. CONCLUSION: The results of this analysis provide a framework for future automated global surveillance efforts that reduce manual input and improve timeliness of reporting. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2009 | 10.1186/1471-2105-10-385 | BMC Bioinformatics |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
bioinformatics,new media,public health,real time,disease outbreak,algorithms,internet,system design,microarrays | Data science,Public health,Biology,News media,Bioinformatics,Parsing,International health,Vocabulary,The Internet | Journal |
Volume | Issue | ISSN |
10 | 1 | 1471-2105 |
Citations | PageRank | References |
18 | 0.41 | 15 |
Authors | ||
3 | ||
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mikaela Keller | 1 | 39 | 3.22 |
| Clark C. Freifeld | 2 | 25 | 1.91 |
| John S Brownstein | 3 | 191 | 21.62 |