Tracking biological relations in texts: a Referent Grammar based approach

In this paper, we describe a method for extracting biological relations (in the first place, relations used in the KEGG ontology of biological pathways) from scientific texts. The main assumption is that correct syntactic analysis combined with domain-specific heuristics provides a good basis for relation extraction. We propose an algorithm that searches through the syntactic trees produced by a parser based on a formalism called Referent Grammar (inspired by Categorial Grammar), identifies relations mentioned in the sentence, and classifies them with respect to their semantic class and epistemic status (facts, counterfactuals, hypotheses).