Named entity recognition and classification in biomedical text using classifier ensemble.

Named Entity Recognition and Classification (NERC) is an important task in information extraction for biomedicine domain. Biomedical Named Entities include mentions of proteins, genes, DNA, RNA, etc. which, in general, have complex structures and are difficult to recognise. In this paper, we propose a Single Objective Optimisation based classifier ensemble technique using the search capability of Genetic Algorithm (GA) for NERC in biomedical texts. Here, GA is used to quantify the amount of voting for each class in each classifier. We use diverse classification methods like Conditional Random Field and Support Vector Machine to build a number of models depending upon the various representations of the set of features and/or feature templates. The proposed technique is evaluated with two benchmark datasets, namely JNLPBA 2004 and GENETAG. Experiments yield the overall F- measure values of 75.97% and 95.90%, respectively. Comparisons with the existing systems show that our proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance.

The CHEMDNER corpus of chemicals and drugs and its annotation principles.

The automatic extraction of chemical information from text requires the recognition of chemical entity mentions as one of its key steps. When developing supervised named entity recognition (NER) systems, the availability of a large, manually annotated text corpus is desirable. Furthermore, large corpora permit the robust evaluation and comparison of different approaches that detect chemicals in documents. We present the CHEMDNER corpus, a collection of 10,000 PubMed abstracts that contain a total of 84,355 chemical entity mentions labeled manually by expert chemistry literature curators, following annotation guidelines specifically defined for this task. The abstracts of the CHEMDNER corpus were selected to be representative for all major chemical disciplines. Each of the chemical entity mentions was manually labeled according to its structure-associated chemical entity mention (SACEM) class: abbreviation, family, formula, identifier, multiple, systematic and trivial. The difficulty and consistency of tagging chemicals in text was measured using an agreement study between annotators, obtaining a percentage agreement of 91. For a subset of the CHEMDNER corpus (the test set of 3,000 abstracts) we provide not only the Gold Standard manual annotations, but also mentions automatically detected by the 26 teams that participated in the BioCreative IV CHEMDNER chemical mention recognition task. In addition, we release the CHEMDNER silver standard corpus of automatically extracted mentions from 17,000 randomly selected PubMed abstracts. A version of the CHEMDNER corpus in the BioC format has been generated as well. We propose a standard for required minimum information about entity annotations for the construction of domain specific corpora on chemical and drug entities. The CHEMDNER corpus and annotation guidelines are available at: http://www.biocreative.org/resources/biocreative-iv/chemdner-corpus/.

Biomedical named entity extraction: some issues of corpus compatibilities.

BACKGROUND: Named Entity (NE) extraction is one of the most fundamental and important tasks in biomedical information extraction. It involves identification of certain entities from text and their classification into some predefined categories. In the biomedical community, there is yet no general consensus regarding named entity (NE) annotation; thus, it is very difficult to compare the existing systems due to corpus incompatibilities. Due to this problem we can not also exploit the advantages of using different corpora together. In our present work we address the issues of corpus compatibilities, and use a single objective optimization (SOO) based classifier ensemble technique that uses the search capability of genetic algorithm (GA) for NE extraction in biomedicine. We hypothesize that the reliability of predictions of each classifier differs among the various output classes. We use Conditional Random Field (CRF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) frameworks to build a number of models depending upon the various representations of the set of features and/or feature templates. It is to be noted that we tried to extract the features without using any deep domain knowledge and/or resources. RESULTS: In order to assess the challenges of corpus compatibilities, we experiment with the different benchmark datasets and their various combinations. Comparison results with the existing approaches prove the efficacy of the used technique. GA based ensemble achieves around 2% performance improvements over the individual classifiers. Degradation in performance on the integrated corpus clearly shows the difficulties of the task. CONCLUSIONS: In summary, our used ensemble based approach attains the state-of-the-art performance levels for entity extraction in three different kinds of biomedical datasets. The possible reasons behind the better performance in our used approach are the (i). use of variety and rich features as described in Subsection "Features for named entity extraction"; (ii) use of GA based classifier ensemble technique to combine the outputs of multiple classifiers.