As part of the BioNLP Open Shared Tasks 2019, the CRAFT Shared Tasks 2019 provides a platform to gauge the state of the art for three fundamental language processing tasks — dependency parse construction, coreference resolution, and ontology concept identification — over full-text biomedical articles. The structural annotation task requires the automatic generation of dependency parses for each sentence of an article given only the article text. The coreference resolution task focuses on linking coreferring base noun phrase mentions into chains using the symmetrical and transitive identity relation. The ontology concept annotation task involves the identification of concept mentions within text using the classes of ten distinct ontologies in the biomedical domain, both unmodified and augmented with extension classes. This paper provides an overview of each task, including descriptions of the data provided to participants and the evaluation metrics used, and discusses participant results relative to baseline performances for each of the three tasks.

This paper reports SuperCAT, a corpus analysis toolkit. It is a radical extension of SubCAT, the Sublanguage Corpus Analysis Toolkit, from sublanguage analysis to corpus analysis in general. The idea behind SuperCAT is that representative corpora have no tendency towards closure―that is, they tend towards infinity. In contrast, non-representative corpora have a tendency towards closure―roughly, finiteness. SuperCAT focuses on general techniques for the quantitative description of the characteristics of any corpus (or other language sample), particularly concerning the characteristics of lexical distributions. Additionally, SuperCAT features a complete re-engineering of the previous SubCAT architecture.

Sublanguages are varieties of language that form “subsets” of the general language, typically exhibiting particular types of lexical, semantic, and other restrictions and deviance. SubCAT, the Sublanguage Corpus Analysis Toolkit, assesses the representativeness and closure properties of corpora to analyze the extent to which they are either sublanguages, or representative samples of the general language. The current version of SubCAT contains scripts and applications for assessing lexical closure, morphological closure, sentence type closure, over-represented words, and syntactic deviance. Its operation is illustrated with three case studies concerning scientific journal articles, patents, and clinical records. Materials from two language families are analyzed―English (Germanic), and Bulgarian (Slavic). The software is available at sublanguage.sourceforge.net under a liberal Open Source license.

Systems that locate mentions of concepts from ontologies in free text are known as ontology concept recognition systems. This paper describes an approach to the evaluation of the workings of ontology concept recognition systems through use of a structured test suite and presents a publicly available test suite for this purpose. It is built using the principles of descriptive linguistic fieldwork and of software testing. More broadly, we also seek to investigate what general principles might inform the construction of such test suites. The test suite was found to be effective in identifying performance errors in an ontology concept recognition system. The system could not recognize 2.1% of all canonical forms and no non-canonical forms at all. Regarding the question of general principles of test suite construction, we compared this test suite to a named entity recognition test suite constructor. We found that they had twenty features in total and that seven were shared between the two models, suggesting that there is a core of feature types that may be applicable to test suite construction for any similar type of application.