A New Machine-Learning Extracting Approach to Construct a Knowledge Base: A Case Study on Global Stromatolites over Geological Time

Within any scientific disciplines, a large amount of data are buried within various literature depositories and archives, making it difficult to manually extract useful information from the datum swamps. The machine-learning extraction of data therefore is necessary for the big-data-based studies. Here, we develop a new text-mining technique to reconstruct the global database of the Precambrian to Recent stromatolites, providing better understanding of secular changes of stromatolites though geological time. The step-by-step data extraction process is described as below. First, the PDF documents of stromatolite-containing literatures were collected, and converted into text formation. Second, a glossary and tag-labeling system using NLP (Natural Language Processing) software was employed to search for all possible candidate pairs from each sentence within the papers collected here. Third, each candidate pair and features were represented as a factor graph model using a series of heuristic procedures to score the weights of each pair feature. Occurrence data of stromatolites versus stratigraphical units (abbreviated as Strata), facies types, locations, and age worldwide were extracted from literatures, respectively, and their extraction accuracies are 92%/464, 87%/778, 92%/846, and 93%/405 from 3 750 scientific abstracts, respectively, and are 90%/1 734, 86%/2 869, 90%/2 055 and 91%/857 from 11 932 papers, respectively. A total of 10 072 unique datum items were identified. The newly obtained stromatolite dataset demonstrates that their stratigraphical occurrences reached a pronounced peak during the Proterozoic (2 500–541 Ma), followed by a distinct fall during the Early Phanerozoic, and overall fluctuations through the Phanerozoic (541–0 Ma). Globally, seven stromatolite hotspots were identified from the new dataset, including western United States, eastern United States, western Europe, India, South Africa, northern China, and southern China. The proportional occurrences of inland aquatic stromatolites remain rather low (∼ 20%) in comparison to marine stromatolites from the Precambrian to Jurassic, and then display a significant increase (30%–70%) from the Cretaceous to the present.