UA Startup Licenses Natural Language Processing Algorithm
Tucson, Ariz. – The University of Arizona has licensed an automated information extraction software system invented in the College of Science to startup Lum.AI LLC. Mihai Surdeanu, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science in the College of Science, was the lead inventor who developed the system in collaboration with PhD candidate Gustave Hahn-Powell in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences focusing on computational linguistics alongside computer science postdoc Marco Antonio Valenzuela-Escárcega, PhD.
“We were faced with the problem of developing a holistic understanding of the field of signaling pathway fragments involved in cancer from biomedical research,” says Surdeanu. “We needed an automated system to extract that information from the millions of papers and journals published each year.”
Not only did the team develop this system, but they designed it with the end-user in mind, ensuring that the results generated are easy to interpret.
As it stands, there are millions of bio-related papers and journals published yearly. For a researcher or clinician, developing a truly holistic understanding of the field – for example, the systematic matching of genomic alterations in a tumor with proper drug treatments – is an immense task. In order to develop a complete understanding of the different mechanisms and cellular processes involved in a specific tumor type, the inventors devised an automated system to extract this information from the literature and generate easily interpretable answers for users.
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Mihai Surdeanu
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