1,247 research outputs found
BioRED: A Comprehensive Biomedical Relation Extraction Dataset
Automated relation extraction (RE) from biomedical literature is critical for
many downstream text mining applications in both research and real-world
settings. However, most existing benchmarking datasets for bio-medical RE only
focus on relations of a single type (e.g., protein-protein interactions) at the
sentence level, greatly limiting the development of RE systems in biomedicine.
In this work, we first review commonly used named entity recognition (NER) and
RE datasets. Then we present BioRED, a first-of-its-kind biomedical RE corpus
with multiple entity types (e.g., gene/protein, disease, chemical) and relation
pairs (e.g., gene-disease; chemical-chemical), on a set of 600 PubMed articles.
Further, we label each relation as describing either a novel finding or
previously known background knowledge, enabling automated algorithms to
differentiate between novel and background information. We assess the utility
of BioRED by benchmarking several existing state-of-the-art methods, including
BERT-based models, on the NER and RE tasks. Our results show that while
existing approaches can reach high performance on the NER task (F-score of
89.3%), there is much room for improvement for the RE task, especially when
extracting novel relations (F-score of 47.7%). Our experiments also demonstrate
that such a comprehensive dataset can successfully facilitate the development
of more accurate, efficient, and robust RE systems for biomedicine
Automated Georeferencing of Antarctic Species
Many text documents in the biological domain contain references to the toponym of specific phenomena (e.g. species sightings) in natural language form "In Garwood Valley summer activity was 0.2% for Umbilicaria aprina and 1.7% for Caloplaca sp. ..."
While methods have been developed to extract place names from documents, and attention has been given to the interpretation of spatial prepositions, the ability to connect toponym mentions in text with the phenomena to which they refer (in this case species) has been given limited attention, but would be of considerable benefit for the task of mapping specific phenomena mentioned in text documents.
As part of work to create a pipeline to automate georeferencing of species within legacy documents, this paper proposes a method to: (1) recognise species and toponyms within text and (2) match each species mention to the relevant toponym mention. Our methods find significant promise in a bespoke rules- and dictionary-based approach to recognise species within text (F1 scores up to 0.87 including partial matches) but less success, as yet, recognising toponyms using multiple gazetteers combined with an off the shelf natural language processing tool (F1 up to 0.62).
Most importantly, we offer a contribution to the relatively nascent area of matching toponym references to the object they locate (in our case species), including cases in which the toponym and species are in different sentences. We use tree-based models to achieve precision as high as 0.88 or an F1 score up to 0.68 depending on the downsampling rate. Initial results out perform previous research on detecting entity relationships that may cross sentence boundaries within biomedical text, and differ from previous work in specifically addressing species mapping
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