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Updated: Jun 21, 2026

Genome-wide Protein-protein Interaction Screening by Protein-fragment Complementation Assay (PCA) in Living Cells
Published on: March 3, 2015
A realistic assessment of methods for extracting gene/protein interactions from free text
Renata Kabiljo1, Andrew B Clegg, Adrian J Shepherd
1School of Crystallography and Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX UK. r.kabiljo@mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk
Background:
The automated extraction of gene and/or protein interactions from the literature is one of the most important targets of biomedical text mining research. In this paper we present a realistic evaluation of gene/protein interaction mining relevant to potential non-specialist users. Hence we have specifically avoided methods that are complex to install or require reimplementation, and we coupled our chosen extraction methods with a state-of-the-art biomedical named entity tagger.
Results:
Our results show: that performance across different evaluation corpora is extremely variable; that the use of tagged (as opposed to gold standard) gene and protein names has a significant impact on performance, with a drop in F-score of over 20 percentage points being commonplace; and that a simple keyword-based benchmark algorithm when coupled with a named entity tagger outperforms two of the tools most widely used to extract gene/protein interactions.
Conclusion:
In terms of availability, ease of use and performance, the potential non-specialist user community interested in automatically extracting gene and/or protein interactions from free text is poorly served by current tools and systems. The public release of extraction tools that are easy to install and use, and that achieve state-of-art levels of performance should be treated as a high priority by the biomedical text mining community.
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