Extraction of Gene-Environment Interaction from the Biomedical Literature

Abstract

Genetic information in the literature has been extensively looked into for the purpose of discovering the etiology of a disease. As the gene-disease relation is sensitive to external factors, their identification is important to study a disease. Environmental influences, which are usually called Gene-Environment interaction (GxE), have been considered as important factors and have extensively been researched in biology. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of systems for automatic GxE extraction from the biomedical literature due to new challenges: (1) there are no preprocessing tools and corpora for GxE, (2) expressions of GxE are often quite implicit, and (3) document-level comprehension is usually required. We propose to overcome these challenges with neural network models and show that a modified sequence-to-sequence model with a static RNN decoder produces a good performance in GxE recognition.