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.

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.