Cold/Cozy Mice - Finding the needles in the haystack of biomedical literature

Strategies that mine or summarize the scientific literature exist but have been largely focused on recovery of named entities (e.g. proteins, cells) or more sophisticated methods that make use of ontologies to recover also related terms and even, more recently, machine learning methods when there is sufficient training data.

Our Approach: we describe a use case faced by a biomedical scientist who needs to compare tumor volume/weight results in papers describing mice experiments where mice were exposed to the same or similar compounds but housed in different temperatures. In our approach, we have extracted annotations of units and measures (U&M) in scientific literature, which we then used in combination with contextual information (e.g. section of the paper) and regular expressions to identify the specific entity being measured (e.g. Housing Temperature).