Chance Discovery Employing Text Mining on Scientific Subjects

What is Chance Discovery?

Chance discovery means discovering chances - the breaking points in systems, the marketing windows in business, etc. It involves determining the significance of some piece of information about an event and then using this new knowledge in decision making. The techniques developed combine data mining methods for finding rare but important events with knowledge management, groupware, and social psychology. Theoretical Computer Science Springer.com

ser·en·dip·i·ty 1. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.2. The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.3. An instance of making such a discovery.

Fortuitous accidents

Accidents in medicine: The idea sends chills down your spine as you conjure up thoughts of misdiagnoses, mistakenly prescribed drugs, and wrongly amputated limbs. Yet while accidents in the examining room or on the operating table can be regrettable, even tragic, those that occur in the laboratory can sometimes lead to spectacular advances, life-saving treatments, and Nobel Prizes.

PBS NOVA

“It takes years of study to create a chance discovery, “writes Ashley Hay.

author of the Science of Serendipity

Can we use text mining techniques to speed up this process?

What Do We Use Text Mining For?

There are so many different things included in text miningfrom social network dynamics to searching the web

The importance of the corpus

Using a corpus Here on the left is an example in the social sciences but

these techniques are also used to evaluate the capacities of industrial companies via what they put on their webpages and so on...

Case Studies Proposed

To give you some concrete situations to deal withtwo examples are suggested

Poisonous or Venomous Animals

The Curious Case of Dental & Arterial Plaques

Most venomous animals appear to produce their toxins

Not the blue ringed octopus

Its venom contains a neurotoxin produced by Bacteria

This toxin isTetrodotoxin

synthesized by several bacterial species, including strains of the family Vibrionaceae, q.v., Pseudomonas sp., and Photobacterium phosphoreum.

The venom is stored in its salaviary glands

Not an isolated exampleMany animals host bacteria to provide poisons

Manually identified keywords or keyphrases

Catagories

Placement of the venom,

Phrases associated with the toxin, venom, poison

Structures associated with hosting the bacteria

Possible Results

Modified salivary glands

The poison is actually a cocktail of chemicals

Gland, duct, mucas etc

What will you discover?Should you make separate corpuses for before & after the source of the poison was correctly identified as bacterial?

Once you have begun manually identify key phrases, add synonyms, and see the the patterns that result ...then you can try to automate this process.

How can this system be optimized?

When you have some results there is also the challenge of putting them into perspective.If the corpus of the king cobra has many phrases similar to the blue ringed octopus what does this mean?

For many years medicine has known that dental plaque was caused by oral bacteria

However in 2008 University of Florida researchers cornered the bacterial ringleaders of gum disease inside human artery-clogging plaque see

Human Atherosclerotic Plaque Contains Viable Invasive Actinobacillus actinomycetemcomitans and Porphyromonas gingivalis byEmil V. Kozarov, Brian R. Dorn, Charles E. Shelburne, William A. Dunn Jr,and Ann Progulske-Fox

The Curious Case of Dental & Arterial Plaques

What does this mean?

If these two have the same cause perhaps other places were the keyword is plaque is also bacterial in origin or

that microbes are implicated

Again more or less the same protocol

Manually search texts to identify keyphrases

Include synonyms, science direct, google scholar etc

Find other medical conditions that refer to plaque or use simlar phrases

Create corpuses, manuplate searches, automate

Analyze the results and present them

Good LuckContact me if you have any questions

yuknachris(at)yahoo.com