Evaluating contributions of natural language parsers to protein–protein interaction extraction

Motivation: While text mining technologies for biomedical research have gained popularity as a way to take advantage of the explosive growth of information in text form in biomedical papers, selecting appropriate natural language processing (NLP) tools is still difficult for researchers who are not familiar with recent advances in NLP. This article provides a comparative evaluation of several state-of-the-art natural language parsers, focusing on the task of extracting protein–protein interaction (PPI) from biomedical papers. We measure how each parser, and its output representation, contributes to accuracy improvement when the parser is used as a component in a PPI system