We introduce an end-to-end system capable of named-entity detection, normalization and relation extraction for extracting information about bacteria and their habitats from biomedical literature. Our system is based on deep learning, CRF classifiers and vector space models. We train and evaluate the system on the BioNLP 2016 Shared Task Bacteria Biotope data. The official evaluation shows that the joint performance of our entity detection and relation extraction models outperforms the winning team of the Shared Task by 19pp on F1-score, establishing a new top score for the task. We also achieve state-of-the-art results in the normalization task. Our system is open source and freely available at https://github.com/TurkuNLP/BHE.

We study and compare two different approaches to the task of automatic assignment of predefined classes to clinical free-text narratives. In the first approach this is treated as a traditional mention-level named-entity recognition task, while the second approach treats it as a sentence-level multi-label classification task. Performance comparison across these two approaches is conducted in the form of sentence-level evaluation and state-of-the-art methods for both approaches are evaluated. The experiments are done on two data sets consisting of Finnish clinical text, manually annotated with respect to the topics pain and acute confusion. Our results suggest that the mention-level named-entity recognition approach outperforms sentence-level classification overall, but the latter approach still manages to achieve the best prediction scores on several annotation classes.