A critical review of PASBio's argument structures for biomedical verbs.
BACKGROUND
Propositional representations of biomedical knowledge are a critical component of most aspects of semantic mining in biomedicine. However, the proper set of propositions has yet to be determined. Recently, the PASBio project proposed a set of propositions and argument structures for biomedical verbs. This initial set of representations presents an opportunity for evaluating the suitability of predicate-argument structures as a scheme for representing verbal semantics in the biomedical domain. Here, we quantitatively evaluate several dimensions of the initial PASBio propositional structure repository.


RESULTS
We propose a number of metrics and heuristics related to arity, role labelling, argument realization, and corpus coverage for evaluating large-scale predicate-argument structure proposals. We evaluate the metrics and heuristics by applying them to PASBio 1.0.


CONCLUSIONS
PASBio demonstrates the suitability of predicate-argument structures for representing aspects of the semantics of biomedical verbs. Metrics related to theta-criterion violations and to the distribution of arguments are able to detect flaws in semantic representations, given a set of predicate-argument structures and a relatively small corpus annotated with them.
Cohen
K Bretonnel
KB
Center for Computational Pharmacology, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, CO, USA. kevin.cohen@gmail.com
Hunter
Lawrence
L
D000043:Abstracting and Indexing / Q000379:methods; D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D016208:Databases, Factual; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D012660:Semantics; D012984:Software; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled