DrugNerAR: linguistic rule-based anaphora resolver for drug-drug interaction extraction in pharmacological documents

DrugNerAR, a drug anaphora resolution system is presented to address the problem of co-referring expressions in pharmacological literature. This development is part of a larger and innovative study about automatic drug-drug interaction extraction. Besides, a corpus has been developed in order to analyze the phenomena and evaluate the current approach. The system uses a set of linguistic rules inspired by Centering Theory over the analysis provided by a biomedical syntactic parser. Semantic information provided by Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is also integrated in order to improve the recognition and the resolution of nominal drug anaphors. This linguistic rule-based approach shows very promising results for the challenge of accounting for anaphoric expressions in pharmacological texts.