Bayesian inference of protein-protein interactions from biological literature

MOTIVATION Protein-protein interaction (PPI) extraction from published biological articles has attracted much attention because of the importance of protein interactions in biological processes. Despite significant progress, mining PPIs from literatures still rely heavily on time- and resource-consuming manual annotations. RESULTS In this study, we developed a novel methodology based on Bayesian networks (BNs) for extracting PPI triplets (a PPI triplet consists of two protein names and the corresponding interaction word) from unstructured text. The method achieved an overall accuracy of 87% on a cross-validation test using manually annotated dataset. We also showed, through extracting PPI triplets from a large number of PubMed abstracts, that our method was able to complement human annotations to extract large number of new PPIs from literature. AVAILABILITY Programs/scripts we developed/used in the study are available at http://stat.fsu.edu/~jinfeng/datasets/Bio-SI-programs-Bayesian-chowdhary-zhang-liu.zip. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.