Exploiting the performance of dictionary-based bio-entity name recognition in biomedical literature

Bio-entity name recognition is the key step for information extraction from biomedical literature. This paper presents a dictionary-based bio-entity name recognition approach. The approach expands the bio-entity name dictionary via the Abbreviation Definitions identifying algorithm, improves the recall rate through the improved edit distance algorithm and adopts some post-processing methods including Pre-keyword and Post-keyword expansion, Part of Speech expansion, merge of adjacent bio-entity names and the exploitation of the contextual cues to further improve the performance. Experiment results show that with this approach even an internal dictionary-based system could achieve a fairly good performance. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.