Overview of the Regulatory Network of Plant Seed Development (SeeDev) Task at the BioNLP Shared Task 2016.

This paper presents the SeeDev Task of the BioNLP Shared Task 2016. The purpose of the SeeDev Task is the extraction from scientific articles of the descriptions of genetic and molecular mechanisms involved in seed development of the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. The SeeDev task consists in the extraction of many different event types that involve a wide range of entity types so that they accurately reflect the complexity of the biological mechanisms. The corpus is composed of paragraphs selected from the full-texts of relevant scientific articles. In this paper, we describe the organization of the SeeDev task, the corpus characteristics, and the metrics used for the evaluation of participant systems. We analyze and discuss the final results of the seven participant systems to the test. The best F-score is 0.432, which is similar to the scores achieved in similar tasks on molecular biology.