A Formal Framework on the Semantics of Regulatory Relations and Their Presence as Verbs in Biomedical Texts

摘要

Relations used in biomedical ontologies and expressed in biomedical texts can be very general or very specific. Regulatory relations are used widely in regulatory networks, for example, and therefore they appear systematically and highly frequently in biomedical texts. This work focuses on the logical properties of positive and negative regulations, both as formal relations and the frequency of their usage as verbs in texts. The paper discusses whether there exists a weak transitivity-like property for the relations. Our corpora consist of biomedical patents, Medline abstracts and the British National Corpus (BNC). Finally, the paper discusses the use of the relations for semantic indexing in information retrieval.