Multilingual translation for zero-shot biomedical classification using BioTranslator

Hanwen Xu, Addie Woicik, Hoifung Poon, Russ B. Altman and Sheng Wang ()
Additional contact information
Hanwen Xu: University of Washington
Addie Woicik: University of Washington
Hoifung Poon: Microsoft Research
Russ B. Altman: Stanford University
Sheng Wang: University of Washington

Nature Communications, 2023, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: Abstract Existing annotation paradigms rely on controlled vocabularies, where each data instance is classified into one term from a predefined set of controlled vocabularies. This paradigm restricts the analysis to concepts that are known and well-characterized. Here, we present the novel multilingual translation method BioTranslator to address this problem. BioTranslator takes a user-written textual description of a new concept and then translates this description to a non-text biological data instance. The key idea of BioTranslator is to develop a multilingual translation framework, where multiple modalities of biological data are all translated to text. We demonstrate how BioTranslator enables the identification of novel cell types using only a textual description and how BioTranslator can be further generalized to protein function prediction and drug target identification. Our tool frees scientists from limiting their analyses within predefined controlled vocabularies, enabling them to interact with biological data using free text.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36476-2 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:14:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-023-36476-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-36476-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().