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A realistic assessment of methods for extracting gene/protein interactions from free text

Kabiljo, R; Clegg, AB; Shepherd, AJ; (2009) A realistic assessment of methods for extracting gene/protein interactions from free text. BMC BIOINFORMATICS , 10 , Article 233. 10.1186/1471-2105-10-233. Green open access

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Abstract

Background: The automated extraction of gene and/or protein interactions from the literature is one of the most important targets of biomedical text mining research. In this paper we present a realistic evaluation of gene/protein interaction mining relevant to potential non-specialist users. Hence we have specifically avoided methods that are complex to install or require reimplementation, and we coupled our chosen extraction methods with a state-of-the-art biomedical named entity tagger.Results: Our results show: that performance across different evaluation corpora is extremely variable; that the use of tagged (as opposed to gold standard) gene and protein names has a significant impact on performance, with a drop in F-score of over 20 percentage points being commonplace; and that a simple keyword-based benchmark algorithm when coupled with a named entity tagger outperforms two of the tools most widely used to extract gene/protein interactions.Conclusion: In terms of availability, ease of use and performance, the potential non-specialist user community interested in automatically extracting gene and/or protein interactions from free text is poorly served by current tools and systems. The public release of extraction tools that are easy to install and use, and that achieve state-of-art levels of performance should be treated as a high priority by the biomedical text mining community.

Type: Article
Title: A realistic assessment of methods for extracting gene/protein interactions from free text
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-10-233
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-10-233
Language: English
Additional information: © 2009 Kabiljo et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: GENE, PROTEINS, CORPUS, NAMES
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/118373
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