Resolving anaphoras for the extraction of drug-drug interactions in pharmacological documents

Background: Drug-drug interactions are frequently reported in the increasing amount of biomedical literature. Information Extraction (IE) techniques have been devised as a useful instrument to manage this knowledge. Nevertheless, IE at the sentence level has a limited effect because of the frequent references to previous entities in the discourse, a phenomenon known as `anaphora'. DrugNerAR, a drug anaphora resolution system is presented to address the problem of co-referring expressions in pharmacological literature. This development is part of a larger and innovative study about automatic drug-drug interaction extraction. Methods: The system uses a set of linguistic rules drawn by Centering Theory over the analysis provided by a biomedical syntactic parser. Semantic information provided by the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is also integrated in order to improve the recognition and the resolution of nominal drug anaphors. Besides, a corpus has been developed in order to...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Isabel Segura-Bedmar, Mario Crespo, César de Pablo-Sánchez, Paloma Martínez
• Keywords: Anaphora Resolution, Anaphoric Expressions, BMCBI 2010, Drug Anaphora Resolution