DIMACS at the TREC 2004 Genomics Track

DIMACS participated in the text categorization and ad hoc retrieval tasks of the TREC 2004 Genomics track. For the categorization task, we tackled the triage and annotation hierarchy subtasks. 1. TEXT CATEGORIZATION TASK The Mouse Genome Informatics (MGI) project of the Jackson Laboratory provides data on the genetics, genomics, and biology of the laboratory mouse. In particular, the Mouse Genome Database (MGD) contains information on the characteristics and functions of genes in the mouse, and on where this information appeared in the scientific literature. Human curators encode this information using controlled vocabulary terms from the Gene Ontology (GO), and provide citations to documents that report each piece of information. GO consists of three structured networks: Biological Process (BP), Molecular Function (MF), and Cellular Component (CC)) of terms describing attributes of genes and gene products. The TREC 2004 Genomics track defined a categorization task with three subtasks based on simplified versions of this curation process. DIMACS participated in two of those subtasks, triage and annotation hierarchy, but not in the annotation hierarchy plus evidence subtask. We discuss our two subtasks below, and full details are available in the track overview paper [4].