Improving accessibility and distinction between negative results in biomedical relation extraction

Abstract

Accessible negative results are relevant for researchers and clinicians not only to limit their search space but also to prevent the costly re-exploration of research hypotheses. However, most biomedical relation extraction datasets do not seek to distinguish between a false and a negative relation among two biomedical entities. Furthermore, datasets created using distant supervision techniques also have some false negative relations that constitute undocumented/unknown relations (missing from a knowledge base). We propose to improve the distinction between these concepts, by revising a subset of the relations marked as false on the phenotype-gene relations corpus and give the first steps to automatically distinguish between the false (F), negative (N), and unknown (U) results. Our work resulted in a sample of 127 manually annotated FNU relations and a weighted-F1 of 0.5609 for their automatic distinction. This work was developed during the 6th Biomedical Linked Annotation Hackathon (BLAH6).

Keywords

• biomedical research
• knowledge base
• negative results
• relation extraction