Parenthetically speaking: classifying the contents of parentheses for text mining
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Feb 7, 2026

Heuristic Mining of Hierarchical Genotypes and Accessory Genome Loci in Bacterial Populations
Published on: December 7, 2021
K Bretonnel Cohen1, Thomas Christiansen, Lawrence E Hunter
1Computational Bioscience Program, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, CO, USA.
Abstract:
The contents of parentheses in biomedical text have many potential uses in text mining applications. However, making use of them requires the ability to determine what class of contents they are. A system that automatically classifies parenthesized text into one of 20 categories is presented and evaluated here. It performs at a micro-averaged accuracy of 68% and a macro-averaged accuracy of 60% on an annotated corpus. The application is available as a Java class and as a Perl module.
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