The BioNLP challenge is a benchmarking challenge, organized by an interdisciplinary community around biology and text mining.
International competitions play an important role in the advances of Information Extraction (IE) as a text-mining domain, especially in the biomedical domain. They aim at providing sound frameworks for the comparison and the evaluation of the technologies on high quality benchmarks. The BioNLP Shared Task (BioNLP-ST) is a community- wide effort in the biomedical field on fine grained information extraction.
The research laboratories MaIAGE (INRA), LIMSI (CNRS), and IJPB (INRA) organized a task on information extraction on plant biology called SeeDev. The main issue in IE is the design of a reference corpus with curated annotations. MaIAGE and LIMSI have both a strong experience and dedicated tools for organizing challenges. The goal of the SeeDev project is the extraction, from scientific papers, of complex events that are involved in the regulation networks of seed development for the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Seed development is an important issue in research, agriculture, and industry. It involves complex mechanisms at a molecular, tissue, physiological, phenotype, and environment levels.
