A Study on the Identification and Classification of Relation Between Biotechnology Terms Using Semantic Parse Tree Kernel

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel kernel called a semantic parse tree kernel that extends the parse tree kernel previously studied to extract protein-protein interactions(PPIs) and shown prominent results. Among the drawbacks of the existing parse tree kernel is that it could degenerate the overall performance of PPI extraction because the kernel function may produce lower kernel values of two sentences than the actual analogy between them due to the simple comparison mechanisms handling only the superficial aspects of the constituting words. The new kernel can compute the lexical semantic similarity as well as the syntactic analogy between two parse trees of target sentences. In order to calculate the lexical semantic similarity, it incorporates context-based word sense disambiguation producing synsets in WordNet as its outputs, which, in turn, can be transformed into more general ones. In experiments, we introduced two new parameters: tree kernel decay factors, and degrees of abstracting lexical concepts which can accelerate the optimization of PPI extraction performance in addition to the conventional SVM's regularization factor. Through these multi-strategic experiments, we confirmed the pivotal role of the newly applied parameters. Additionally, the experimental results showed that semantic parse tree kernel is superior to the conventional kernels especially in the PPI classification tasks.