PADI-web: Platform for Automated Extraction of Animal Disease Information from the Web

The Platform for Automated Extraction of Animal Disease Information from the Web (PADI-web) is a text mining tool for automatic detection, categorization, and extraction of disease outbreak information from Web news articles. PADI-web currently monitors the Web for five exotic animal infectious diseases and eight syndromes in five animal hosts. In the first six months of its operability (January-June 2016), PADI-web detected 73% of the outbreaks of african swine fever, which occurred worldwide and were immediately notified to the World Organisation for Animal Health; 20% of foot-and-mouth disease; 13% of bluetongue, and 62% of highly pathogenic avian influenza, respectively. The event extraction component of PADI-web obtained F-measure scores of 80% for locations, 85% for dates, 95% for diseases, 95% for hosts, and 85% for case numbers. PADI-web allows complementary disease surveillance in the domain of animal health