The Role of N-ary Relations in Representing Biomedical Complexity

Biomedical Relation Extraction is an important task for extracting information from biomedical literature and populating knowledge bases with new data. Most Relation Extraction systems rely on annotated corpora, but the current landscape reveals a lack of diversity in these corpora, limiting models' ability to generalize effectively. N-ary relations, which connect three or more entities, are essential for understanding context-dependent interactions common in the biological domain. By facilitating the creation of more personalized and informative networks, $N$ -ary relations can advance our understanding of complex biological processes, such as cancer interactions. This progress can ultimately contribute to improved therapeutic strategies. This chapter focuses on the Relation Extraction task, with a particular emphasis on $N$ -ary Relation Extraction, discussing the main challenges associated with gathering high-quality and diverse data for this task.