Recognition of Multi-sentence n-ary Subcellular Localization Mentions in Biomedical Abstracts

Background Research into semantic relation recognition from text has focused on the identification of binary relations that are contained within one sentence. In the domain of biomedical documents however relations of interest can have more than two arguments and can also have their entity mentions located on different sentences. An example of this scenario is the ternary relation of “subcellular localization” which relates whether an organism’s (O) protein (P) has subcellular location (L) as one of its target destinations. Empirical evidence suggests that approximately one half of the mentions for this ternary relation reside on multi-sentence passages. Results We introduce a relation recognition algorithm that can detect n-ary relations across multiple sentences in a document, and use the subcellular localization relation as a motivating example. The approach uses a text-graph representation of the entire document that is based on intrasentential edges derived from each sentence’s predicted syntactic parse trees, and on intersentential edges based on either the linking of adjacent sentences or the linking of coreferents, if reliable coreference predictions are available