Detecting Relations in the Gene Regulation Network

The BioNLP Shared Task 2013 is organised to further advance the field of information extraction in biomedical texts. This paper describes our entry in the Gene Regulation Network in Bacteria (GRN) part, for which our system finished in second place (out of five). To tackle this relation extraction task, we employ a basic Support Vector Machine framework. We discuss our findings in constructing local and contextual features, that augment our precision with as much as 7.5%. We touch upon the interaction type hierarchy inherent in the problem, and the importance of the evaluation procedure to encourage exploration of that structure.