Extracting Inter-Sentence Relations for Associating Biological Context with Events in Biomedical Texts.

Journal: IEEE/ACM transactions on computational biology and bioinformatics
Published Date:

Abstract

We present an analysis of the problem of identifying biological context and associating it with biochemical events described in biomedical texts. This constitutes a non-trivial, inter-sentential relation extraction task. We focus on biological context as descriptions of the species, tissue type, and cell type that are associated with biochemical events. We present a new corpus of open access biomedical texts that have been annotated by biology subject matter experts to highlight context-event relations. Using this corpus, we evaluate several classifiers for context-event association along with a detailed analysis of the impact of a variety of linguistic features on classifier performance. We find that gradient tree boosting performs by far the best, achieving an F1 of 0.865 in a cross-validation study.

Authors

  • Enrique Noriega-Atala
    School of Information, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.
  • Paul D Hein
  • Shraddha S Thumsi
  • Zechy Wong
  • Xia Wang
    Department of Neurology, The Sixth People's Hospital of Huizhou City, Huizhou, China.
  • Sean M Hendryx
  • Clayton T Morrison
    School of Information, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.