Contextual label sensitive gated network for biomedical event trigger extraction

[Display omitted] •Contextual label sensitive gated network.•Mixing word embedding and contextual features, capturing the contextual label clues.•Dependency-based word embeddings and attention mechanism.•Achieving the best F1-score in event trigger identification on MLEE corpus. Biomedical events play a key role in improving biomedical research. Event trigger identification, extracting the words describing the event types, is a crucial and prerequisite step in the pipeline process of biomedical event extraction. There exist two main problems in previous methods: (1) The association among contextual trigger labels which can provide significant clues is ignored. (2)The weight between word embeddings and contextual features needs to be adjusted dynamically according to the trigger candidate. In this paper, we propose a novel contextual label sensitive gated network for biomedical event trigger extraction to solve the above two problems, which can mix the two parts dynamically and capture the contextual label clues automatically. Furthermore, we also introduce the dependency-based word embeddings to represent dependency-based semantic information as well as attention mechanism to get more focused representations. Experimental results show that our approach advances state-of-the-arts and achieves the best F1-score on the commonly used Multi-Level Event Extraction (MLEE) corpus.