Drug name recognition in biomedical texts: a machine-learning-based method

Currently, there is an urgent need to develop a technology for extracting drug information automatically from biomedical texts, and drug name recognition is an essential prerequisite for extracting drug information. This article presents a machine-learning-based approach to recognize drug names in biomedical texts. In this approach, a drug name dictionary is first constructed with the external resource of DrugBank and PubMed. Then a semi-supervised learning method, feature coupling generalization, is used to filter this dictionary. Finally, the dictionary look-up and the condition random field method are combined to recognize drug names. Experimental results show that our approach achieves an F-score of 92.54% on the test set of DDIExtraction2011.