[Corpora-List] Newly enriched semantically annotated corpus and publication

[Paul Thompson]

Paul Thompson, Raheel Nawaz, John McNaught and Sophia Ananiadou
"Enriching a biomedical event corpus with meta-knowledge annotation"
BMC Bioinformatics 2011, 12:393
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/12/393
doi:10.1186/1471-2105-12-393

Abstract
Background

Biomedical papers contain rich information about entities, facts and events of biological relevance. To discover these automatically, we use text mining techniques, which rely on annotated corpora for training. In order to extract protein-protein interactions, genotype-phenotype/gene-disease associations, etc., we rely on event corpora that are annotated with classified, structured representations of important facts and findings contained within text. These provide an important resource for the training of domain-specific information extraction (IE) systems, to facilitate semantic-based searching of documents. Correct interpretation of these events is not possible without additional information, e.g., does an event describe a fact, a hypothesis, an experimental result or an analysis of results? How confident is the author about the validity of her analyses? These and other types of information, which we collectively term meta-knowledge, can be derived from the context of the event.

Results

We have designed an annotation scheme for meta-knowledge enrichment of biomedical event corpora. The scheme is multi-dimensional, in that each event is annotated for 5 different aspects of meta-knowledge that can be derived from the textual context of the event. Textual clues used to determine the values are also annotated. The scheme is intended to be general enough to allow integration with different types of bio-event annotation, whilst being detailed enough to capture important subtleties in the nature of the meta-knowledge expressed in the text. We report here on both the main features of the annotation scheme, as well as its application to the GENIA event corpus (1000 abstracts with 36,858 events). High levels of inter-annotator agreement have been achieved, falling in the range of 0.84-0.93 Kappa.

Conclusion

By augmenting event annotations with meta-knowledge, more sophisticated IE systems can be trained, which allow interpretative information to be specified as part of the search criteria. This can assist in a number of important tasks, e.g., finding new experimental knowledge to facilitate database curation, enabling textual inference to detect entailments and contradictions, etc. To our knowledge, our scheme is unique within the field with regards to the diversity of meta-knowledge aspects annotated for each event.

The corpus and annotation guidelines are available to download at: http://www.nactem.ac.uk/meta-knowledge/

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Paul Thompson
Research Associate
School of Computer Science
National Centre for Text Mining
Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre
University of Manchester
131 Princess Street
Manchester
M1 7DN
UK
Tel: 0161 306 3091
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/Paul.Thompson/





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