BIOSMILE: Adapting Semantic Role Labeling for Biomedical Verbs

In this paper, we construct a biomedical semantic role labeling (SRL) system that can be used to facilitate relation extraction. First, we construct a proposition bank on top of the popular biomedical GENIA treebank following the PropBank annotation scheme. We only annotate the predicate-argument structures (PAS’s) of thirty frequently used biomedical predicates and their corresponding arguments. Second, we use our proposition bank to train a biomedical SRL system, which uses a maximum entropy (ME) model. Thirdly, we automatically generate argument-type templates which can be used to improve classification of biomedical argument types. Our experimental results show that a newswire SRL system that achieves an F-score of 86.29% in the newswire domain can maintain an F-score of 64.64% when ported to the biomedical domain. By using our annotated biomedical corpus, we can increase that F-score by 22.9%. Adding automatically generated template features further increases overall F-score by 0.47% and adjunct arguments (AM) Fscore by 1.57%, respectively.