Event extraction for DNA methylation

BACKGROUND: We consider the task of automatically extracting DNA methylation events from the biomedical domain literature. DNA methylation is a key mechanism of epigenetic control of gene expression and implicated in many cancers, but there has been little study of automatic information extraction for DNA methylation. RESULTS: We present an annotation scheme for DNA methylation following the representation of the BioNLP shared task on event extraction, select a set of 200 abstracts including a representative sample of all PubMed citations relevant to DNA methylation, and introduce manual annotation for this corpus marking nearly 3000 gene/protein mentions and 1500 DNA methylation and demethylation events. We retrain a state-of-the-art event extraction system on the corpus and find that automatic extraction of DNA methylation events, the methylated genes, and their methylation sites can be performed at 78% precision and 76% recall. CONCLUSIONS: Our results demonstrate that reliable extraction methods for DNA methylation events can be created through corpus annotation and straightforward retraining of a general event extraction system. The introduced resources are freely available for use in research from the GENIA project homepage http://www-tsujii.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/GENIA.