Static Relations: a Piece in the Biomedical Information Extraction Puzzle

We propose a static relation extraction task to complement biomedical information extraction approaches. We argue that static relations such as part-whole are implicitly involved in many common extraction settings, define a task setting making them explicit, and discuss their integration into previously proposed tasks and extraction methods. We further identify a specific static relation extraction task motivated by the BioNLP’09 shared task on event extraction, introduce an annotated corpus for the task, and demonstrate the feasibility of the task by experiments showing that the defined relations can be reliably extracted. The task setting and corpus can serve to support several forms of domain information extraction.