Discovering Thematically Coherent Biomedical Documents Using Contextualized Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers-Based Clustering

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 May 12;19(10):5893. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19105893.

Abstract

The increasing expansion of biomedical documents has increased the number of natural language textual resources related to the current applications. Meanwhile, there has been a great interest in extracting useful information from meaningful coherent groupings of textual content documents in the last decade. However, it is challenging to discover informative representations and define relevant articles from the rapidly growing biomedical literature due to the unsupervised nature of document clustering. Moreover, empirical investigations demonstrated that traditional text clustering methods produce unsatisfactory results in terms of non-contextualized vector space representations because that neglect the semantic relationship between biomedical texts. Recently, pre-trained language models have emerged as successful in a wide range of natural language processing applications. In this paper, we propose the Gaussian Mixture Model-based efficient clustering framework that incorporates substantially pre-trained (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for Biomedical Text Mining) BioBERT domain-specific language representations to enhance the clustering accuracy. Our proposed framework consists of main three phases. First, classic text pre-processing techniques are used biomedical document data, which crawled from the PubMed repository. Second, representative vectors are extracted from a pre-trained BioBERT language model for biomedical text mining. Third, we employ the Gaussian Mixture Model as a clustering algorithm, which allows us to assign labels for each biomedical document. In order to prove the efficiency of our proposed model, we conducted a comprehensive experimental analysis utilizing several clustering algorithms while combining diverse embedding techniques. Consequently, the experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the benchmark models by reaching performance measures of Fowlkes mallows score, silhouette coefficient, adjusted rand index, Davies-Bouldin score of 0.7817, 0.3765, 0.4478, 1.6849, respectively. We expect the outcomes of this study will assist domain specialists in comprehending thematically cohesive documents in the healthcare field.

Keywords: document clustering; natural language processing; pre-trained language representation model.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Data Mining* / methods
  • Natural Language Processing*
  • Semantics

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (no. 2019K2A9A2A06020672 and no. 2020R1A2B5B02001717) and also by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 61702324 and grant no. 61911540482) in the People’s Republic of China.