NLM-Chem, a new resource for chemical entity recognition in PubMed full text literature

Automatically identifying chemical and drug names in scientific publications advances information access for this important class of entities in a variety of biomedical disciplines by enabling improved retrieval and linkage to related concepts. While current methods for tagging chemical entities were developed for the article title and abstract, their performance in the full article text is substantially lower. However, the full text frequently contains more detailed chemical information, such as the properties of chemical compounds, their biological effects and interactions with diseases, genes and other chemicals. We therefore present the NLM-Chem corpus, a full-text resource to support the development and evaluation of automated chemical entity taggers. The NLM-Chem corpus consists of 150 full-text articles, doubly annotated by ten expert NLM indexers, with ~5000 unique chemical name annotations, mapped to ~2000 MeSH identifiers. We also describe a substantially improved chemical entity tagger, with automated annotations for all of PubMed and PMC freely accessible through the PubTator web-based interface and API. The NLM-Chem corpus is freely available.