LitWay, Discriminative Extraction for Different Bio-Events

Even a simple biological phenomenon may introduce a complex network of molecular interactions. Scientific literature is one of the trustful resources delivering knowledge of these networks. We propose LitWay, a system for extracting semantic relations from texts. LitWay utilizes a hybrid method that combines both a rule-based method and a machine learning-based method. It is tested on the SeeDev task of BioNLP-ST 2016, achieves the state-of-the-art performance with the F-score of 43.2%, ranking first of all participating teams. To further reveal the linguistic characteristics of each event, we test the system solely with syntactic rules or machine learning, and different combinations of two methods. We find that it is difficult for one method to achieve good performance for all semantic relation types due to the complication of bio-events in the literatures.