Comparable Study of Event Extraction in Newswire and Biomedical Domains

Event extraction is a popular research topic in natural language processing. Several event extraction tasks have been defined for both the newswire and biomedical domains. In general, different systems have been developed for the two domains, despite the fact that the tasks in both domains share a number of characteristics. In this paper, we analyse the commonalities and differences between the tasks in the two domains. Based on this analysis, we demonstrate how an event extraction method originally designed for the biomedical domain can be adapted for application to the newswire domain. The performance is state-of-the-art for both domains, with F-scores of 52.7% for the biomedical domain and 52.1% for the newswire domain in terms of their primary evaluation metrics.