We participated in three of the protein-protein interaction subtasks of the
Second BioCreative Challenge: classification of abstracts relevant for
protein-protein interaction (IAS), discovery of protein pairs (IPS) and text
passages characterizing protein interaction (ISS) in full text documents. We
approached the abstract classification task with a novel, lightweight linear
model inspired by spam-detection techniques, as well as an uncertainty-based
integration scheme. We also used a Support Vector Machine and the Singular
Value Decomposition on the same features for comparison purposes. Our approach
to the full text subtasks (protein pair and passage identification) includes a
feature expansion method based on word-proximity networks. Our approach to the
abstract classification task (IAS) was among the top submissions for this task
in terms of the measures of performance used in the challenge evaluation
(accuracy, F-score and AUC). We also report on a web-tool we produced using our
approach: the Protein Interaction Abstract Relevance Evaluator (PIARE). Our
approach to the full text tasks resulted in one of the highest recall rates as
well as mean reciprocal rank of correct passages. Our approach to abstract
classification shows that a simple linear model, using relatively few features,
is capable of generalizing and uncovering the conceptual nature of
protein-protein interaction from the bibliome. Since the novel approach is
based on a very lightweight linear model, it can be easily ported and applied
to similar problems. In full text problems, the expansion of word features with
word-proximity networks is shown to be useful, though the need for some
improvements is discussed