BioRel: towards large-scale biomedical relation extraction

Background: Although biomedical publications and literature are growing rapidly, there still lacks structured knowledge that can be easily processed by computer programs. In order to extract such knowledge from plain text and transform them into structural form, the relation extraction problem becomes an important issue. Datasets play a critical role in the development of relation extraction methods. However, existing relation extraction datasets in biomedical domain are mainly human-annotated, whose scales are usually limited due to their labor-intensive and time-consuming nature. Results: We construct BioRel, a large-scale dataset for biomedical relation extraction problem, by using Unified Medical Language System as knowledge base and Medline as corpus. We first identify mentions of entities in sentences of Medline and link them to Unified Medical Language System with Metamap. Then, we assign each sentence a relation label by using distant supervision. Finally, we adapt the state-of-the-art deep learning and statistical machine learning methods as baseline models and conduct comprehensive experiments on the BioRel dataset. Conclusions: Based on the extensive experimental results, we have shown that BioRel is a suitable large-scale datasets for biomedical relation extraction, which provides both reasonable baseline performance and many remaining challenges for both deep learning and statistical methods.