Term recognition using Conditional Random fields

A machine learning framework, Conditional Random fields (CRF), is constructed in this study, which exploits syntactic information to recognize biomedical terms. Features used in this CRF framework focus on syntactic information in different levels, including parent nodes, syntactic functions, syntactic paths and term ratios. A series of experiments have been done to study the effects of training sizes, general term recognition and novel term recognition. The experiment results show that features as syntactic paths and term ratios can achieve good precision of term recognition, including both general terms and novel terms. However, the recall of novel term recognition is still unsatisfactory, which calls for more effective features to be used. All in all, as this research studies in depth the uses of some unique syntactic features, it is innovative in respect of constructing machine learning based term recognition system.