Performance of Stanford and Minipar Parser on Biomedical Texts

In this paper, the performance of two dependency parsers, namely Stanford and Minipar, on biomedical texts has been reported. The performance of the parsers to assign dependencies between two biomedical concepts that are already proved to be connected is not satisfying. Both Stanford and Minipar, being statistical parsers, fail to assign dependency relation between two connected concepts if they are distant by at least one clause. Minipar’s performance, in terms of precision, recall and the F-Score of the attachment score (e.g., correctly identified head in a dependency), to parse biomedical text is also measured taking the Stanford’s as a gold standard. The results suggest that Minipar is not suitable yet to parse biomedical texts. In addition, a qualitative investigation reveals that the difference between working principles of the parsers also play a vital role for Minipar’s degraded performance.