Coreference based event-argument relation extraction on biomedical text

This paper presents a new approach to exploit coreference information for extracting event-argument (E-A) relations from biomedical documents. This approach has two advantages: (1) it can extract a large number of valuable E-A relations based on the concept of salience in discourse; (2) it enables us to identify E-A relations over sentence boundaries (cross-links) using transitivity of coreference relations. We propose two coreference-based models: a pipeline based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers, and a joint Markov Logic Network (MLN). We show the effectiveness of these models on a biomedical event corpus. Both models outperform the systems that do not use coreference information. When the two proposed models are compared to each other, joint MLN outperforms pipeline SVM with gold coreference information. © 2011 Yoshikawa et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.