Using Neural Networks for Relation Extraction from Biomedical Literature

Using different sources of information to support automated extracting of relations between biomedical concepts contributes to the development of our understanding of biological systems. The primary comprehensive source of these relations is biomedical literature. Several relation extraction approaches have been proposed to identify relations between concepts in biomedical literature, namely, using neural networks algorithms. The use of multichannel architectures composed of multiple data representations, as in deep neural networks, is leading to state-of-the-art results. The right combination of data representations can eventually lead us to even higher evaluation scores in relation extraction tasks. Thus, biomedical ontologies play a fundamental role by providing semantic and ancestry information about an entity. The incorporation of biomedical ontologies has already been proved to enhance previous state-of-the-art results.Comment: Artificial Neural Networks book (Springer) - Chapter 1

GumDrop at the DISRPT2019 Shared Task: A Model Stacking Approach to Discourse Unit Segmentation and Connective Detection

In this paper we present GumDrop, Georgetown University's entry at the DISRPT 2019 Shared Task on automatic discourse unit segmentation and connective detection. Our approach relies on model stacking, creating a heterogeneous ensemble of classifiers, which feed into a metalearner for each final task. The system encompasses three trainable component stacks: one for sentence splitting, one for discourse unit segmentation and one for connective detection. The flexibility of each ensemble allows the system to generalize well to datasets of different sizes and with varying levels of homogeneity.Comment: Proceedings of Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT2019

Deep learning for extracting protein-protein interactions from biomedical literature

State-of-the-art methods for protein-protein interaction (PPI) extraction are primarily feature-based or kernel-based by leveraging lexical and syntactic information. But how to incorporate such knowledge in the recent deep learning methods remains an open question. In this paper, we propose a multichannel dependency-based convolutional neural network model (McDepCNN). It applies one channel to the embedding vector of each word in the sentence, and another channel to the embedding vector of the head of the corresponding word. Therefore, the model can use richer information obtained from different channels. Experiments on two public benchmarking datasets, AIMed and BioInfer, demonstrate that McDepCNN compares favorably to the state-of-the-art rich-feature and single-kernel based methods. In addition, McDepCNN achieves 24.4% relative improvement in F1-score over the state-of-the-art methods on cross-corpus evaluation and 12% improvement in F1-score over kernel-based methods on "difficult" instances. These results suggest that McDepCNN generalizes more easily over different corpora, and is capable of capturing long distance features in the sentences.Comment: Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the 2017 Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, 10 pages, 2 figures, 6 table

Extracting protein-protein interactions from text using rich feature vectors and feature selection

Because of the intrinsic complexity of natural language, automatically extracting accurate information from text remains a challenge. We have applied rich featurevectors derived from dependency graphs to predict protein-protein interactions using machine learning techniques. We present the first extensive analysis of applyingfeature selection in this domain, and show that it can produce more cost-effective models. For the first time, our technique was also evaluated on several large-scalecross-dataset experiments, which offers a more realistic view on model performance. During benchmarking, we encountered several fundamental problems hindering comparability with other methods. We present a set of practical guidelines to set up ameaningful evaluation. Finally, we have analysed the feature sets from our experiments before and after feature selection, and evaluated the contribution of both lexical and syntacticinformation to our method. The gained insight will be useful to develop better performing methods in this domain