(ZI) process in biology articles. Specifically, we illustrate the linguistic and other features of each zone based on our investigation of articles selected from four …

Abstract

Information extraction (IE) in the biomedical domain is now regarded as an essential technique for the dynamic management of factual information contained in archived journal articles and abstract collections. We aim to provide a technique serving as a basis for pin-pointing and organizing factual information related to experimental results. In this paper, we enhance the idea proposed in (Mizuta and Collier, 2004); annotating articles in terms of rhetorical zones with shallow nesting. We give a qualitative analysis of the zone identification (ZI) process in biology articles. Specifically, we illustrate the linguistic and other features of each zone based on our investigation of articles selected from four major online journals. We also discuss controversial cases and nested zones, and ZI using multiple features. In doing so, we provide a stronger theoretical and practical support for our framework toward automatic ZI.

Information extraction (IE) in the biomedical domain is now regarded as an essential technique for utilizing information contained in archived journal articles and abstract collections such as MEDLINE. Major domain databases often contain incomplete and inconsistent results. Also, a majority of the reported experimental results are only available in unstructured full-text format.
These being combined, scientists need to check with source journal articles to obtain and confirm factual information. Furthermore, they often need to start with document retrieval and face an overwhelming number of candidate articles. Thus, the significance of dynamic management of factual information, specifically an integration and update of experimental results, is self-evident. It would not only save researchers much time used for retrieval and redundant experiments but also help them use the information more effectively. Given the limitations of manual work in terms of both efficiency and accuracy, IE focusing on factual information is of critical importance.

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