TITLE: A reproducibility protocol and dataset on the biomedical sentence similarity
AUTHORS: Alicia  Lara Clares, Juan J. Lastra-Díaz, Ana Garcia-Serrano

[DESCRIPTION]
This protocol introduces a set of reproducibility resources with the aim of allowing the exact replication of the experiments introduced by our main paper [1], which introduces the largest and for the first time reproducible experimental survey on biomedical sentence similarity. HESML V2R1 [2] is the sixth release of our Half-Edge Semantic Measures Library (HESML), which is a linearly scalable and efficient Java software library of ontology-based semantic similarity measures and Information Content (IC) models for ontologies like WordNet, SNOMED-CT, MeSH and GO. 
This protocol sets a self-contained reproducibility platform which contains the Java source code and binaries of our main benchmark program, as well as a Docker image which allows the exact replication of our experiments in any software platform supported by Docker, such as all Linux-based operating systems, Windows or MacOS. All the necessary resources for executing the experiments are published in the permanent repository [3]

Our benchmark program is distributed with the UMLS SNOMED-CT and MeSH ontologies by courtesy of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), as well as all needed software components with the aim of making the setup process easier. Our Docker image provides an exact virtual replica of the machine in which we ran our experiments, thus removing the need to carry-out any tedious setup process, such as the setup of the Named Entity Recognizer tools and other software components. (2022-02-20)

[1] Lara-Clares A, Lastra-Díaz JJ, Garcia-Serrano A. A reproducible experimental survey on biomedical sentence similarity: a string-based method sets the state of the art. Submitted to PLoS One. 2022.

[2] Lara-Clares A, Lastra-Díaz JJ, Garcia-Serrano A. HESML V2R1 Java software library of semantic similarity measures for the biomedical domain. e-cienciaDatos; 2022. doi:10.21950/DOI

[3] Lara-Clares, Alicia; Lastra-Díaz, Juan J.; Garcia-Serrano, Ana, 2021, "Reproducible experiments on word and sentence similarity measures for the biomedical domain",https://doi.org/10.21950/EPNXTR, e-cienciaDatos, V2

[BEFORE_START]
Our benchmarks can be reproduced in any Docker-complaint platform, such as Windows, MacOS or any Linux-based system by following a similar setup to that introduced herein. 

In order to obtain a decrypt password for downloading the required files, you should sign and obtain a license for the National Library of Medicine (NLM) of the United States to use the UMLS Metathesaurus databases, as well as SNOMED-CT and MeSH ontologies included in this Docker image. For this purpose, you should go top the NLM license page, https://uts.nlm.nih.gov//license.html. After that, you could write to eciencia@consorciomadrono.es to obtain the password to decrypt the file. Likewise, you should obtain and sign a Data User Agreement from the Mayo Clinic to use the MedSTS dataset by sending the authors the Data User Agreement form, https://n2c2.dbmi.hms.harvard.edu/data-use-agreement.



[GUIDELINES]
The Docker image provides all software pre-installed, which means that it is not necessary to install them to reproduce the results of this paper. 

[STEPS]
SECTION: Installing Docker on Ubuntu
1. If Docker is not installed in your machine, instructions below install latest version of Docker CE. For further details, we refer the reader to the official Docker setup page https://docs.docker.com/install/linux/docker-ce/ubuntu/

First, we update the system:
 
We install the dependencies:
 
We set stable Docker release
 

We install Docker engine
 
If the installation detailed below fails, you can 
 

SECTION: Downloading resources from the repository
2. Now, we download and decrypt the external resources such as pre-trained models and dependencies.

First, we create a data directory which will contain all the datasets, pre-trained models and dependencies for executing the experiments
 
Now, we download extract the BERT pretrained models compressed file (20,2 GB) to the HESML_DATA
 
We also download and extract the pre-trained character and sentence embeddings models (20GB) in the same directory
 

We download and extract the pre-trained word embedding models (40GB) in the same directory
 
And finally, we download, decrypt and extract the rest of dependencies (10GB), such as datasets, UMLS, Java libraries, cTAKES, Metamap and MetamapLite.
 

 

 
Now, we can remove all the compressed files


 

 

SECTION: Create and run a Docker container with HESML and dependencies
3. In this step, we create and run a Docker container which have pre-installed all the necessary software for executing the experiments. 
 

 

Now, we create, run and attach to the Docker container named "HESMLV2R1" which will share a volume with the HESML_DATA directory. 

 

 
In the following, we will be working on the Docker container, which has been attached in the previous step.

Now, we clone the HESML repository from Github
 
And we copy the external libraries and dependencies into the HESMLSTSclient directory and we copy the last HESML core jar file into the client directory
 

 

SECTION: Launch the Metamap and cTAKES services
4. The experiments evaluated herein use the Metamap [2], MetamapLite [3] and cTAKES [4] external NER tools to annotate CUI codes on the sentences. Thus, we have to launch the NER tools services following the next steps.
 


First, we open the Metamap directory
 
We start the Metamap dependency services 
 

 

Now, we start the Metamap service
 
Then, press "Enter" key and execute the next step using your UMLS KEY.
 

 


 


SECTION: UBUNTU-based instructions to run our benchmarks on a Docker container
5. The final step is the execution of the experiments evaluated in out primary paper. 
 


To run the experiments, first step into the HESMLSTSclient directory
 
Before running the experiments, remove previous results and temporal files:
 


Now, execute the HESMLSTSclient with the default options
 
 
 


 

SECTION: Installing Docker on Ubuntu
1.1. 
SECTION: Post-processing the experiments
6. The post-processing stage use the RStudio software installed in the local machine to create the final latex tables and CSV files.

 



In our experiments, we use the last release of RStudio software (Version 1.4) with R version 4.1.2 (2021-11-01). We also install the following packages for executing the post-processing scripts:
collections
kableExtra
knitr
readr
stringr
xtable


After executing the experiments, the raw output files, as well as the R post-processing scripts are automatically copied into the HESML_DATA directory, in a new directory named "ReproducibleResults". Before executing the post-processing scripts, it is necessary to modify the file permissions following the next step:

 

The tables 8, 10-17, figure 5 and appendices A and B are created executing the following R scripts marked in bold as follows:

.[PATH_TO_HESML_DATA_DIRECTORY]/HESML_DATA/ReproducibleResults/Post-scripts
├── bio_sentence_sim_tables.R 
├── bio_analytics_biosses.R
├── bio_analytics_ctr.R
├── bio_analytics_medsts.R
├── bio_sentence_sim_allExperiments_analyzingtablesPreprocessing.R
├── bio_sentence_sim_pvaluesLiBlock.R
├── bio_sentence_sim_pvaluesNER.R
├── bio_sentence_sim_pvalues.R
├── bio_sentence_sim_scripts
│   ├── readBERT.R
│   ├── readBESTCOMBS.R
│   ├── readFlair.R
│   ├── readLiBlockNERexperiment.R
│   ├── readNERexperiment.R
│   ├── readOurWE.R
│   ├── readSent2Vec.R
│   ├── readString.R
│   ├── readSWEM.R
│   ├── readTest.R
│   ├── readUBSM.R
│   ├── readUSE.R
│   └── readWBSM.R


bio_sentence_sim_tables.R : Creates the tables 8,10,11 and 12 in our primary paper [1] as well as all the tables from appendix B. It is also used to extract the best and worst pre-processing configuration in the table 9 of the same paper
bio_sentence_sim_pvalues.R : Creates the tables of the appendix A in our primary paper [1].
bio_sentence_sim_allExperiments_analyzingtablesPreprocessing.R : Creates the tables with all the p-values of the pre-processing experiments using the HESMLSTSImpactPreprocessingclient, which are used in the table 9 of our main paper.
bio_sentence_sim_pvaluesLiBlock.R : Creates a table with the LiBlock NER experiments which is used to detail the p-values in table 12 of the main paper [1].
bio_sentence_sim_pvaluesNER.R : Creates a table with the NER experiments which is used to detail the p-values in table 11 of the main paper [1].
bio_analytics_biosses.R, bio_analytics_medsts.R and bio_analytics_ctr.R: Creates the figure 5 and is used to create the tables 13-17 of our primary paper [1].


 

 


SECTION: UBUNTU-based instructions to run our benchmarks on a Docker container
5.1. [OPTIONAL] Running the pre-processing experiments

In our primary paper [1], we also evaluate the pre-processing configurations of each method, which are detailed in tables 7 and 9, as well as the appendix B of the same paper. This pre-processing experiments are evaluated using the HESMLSTSImpactPreprocessingclient software included in the HESML V2R1 software release [6].

[6] Lara-Clares A, Lastra-Díaz JJ, Garcia-Serrano A. HESML V2R1 Java software library of semantic similarity measures for the biomedical domain. e-cienciaDatos; 2022. doi:10.21950/DOI
 

To execute the pre-processing experiments, run the following command