Incorporating Figure Captions and Descriptive Text in MeSH Term Indexing

The goal of text classification is to automatically assign categories to documents. Deep learning automatically learns effective features from data instead of adopting human-designed features. In this paper, we focus specifically on biomedical document classification using a deep learning approach. We present a novel multichannel TextCNN model for MeSH term indexing. Beyond the normal use of the text from the abstract and title for model training, we also consider figure and table captions, as well as paragraphs associated with the figures and tables. We demonstrate that these latter text sources are important feature sources for our method. A new dataset consisting of these text segments curated from 257,590 full text articles together with the articles{'} MEDLINE/PubMed MeSH terms is publicly available.