BioNLP Shared Task 2011: supporting resources

This paper describes the supporting resources provided for the BioNLP Shared Task 2011. These resources were constructed with the goal to alleviate some of the burden of system development from the participants and allow them to focus on the novel aspects of constructing their event extraction systems. With the availability of these resources we also seek to enable the evaluation of the applicability of specific tools and representations towards improving the performance of event extraction systems. Additionally we supplied evaluation software and services and constructed a visualisation tool, stav, which visualises event extraction results and annotations. These resources helped the participants make sure that their final submissions and research efforts were on track during the development stages and evaluate their progress throughout the duration of the shared task. The visualisation software was also employed to show the differences between the gold annotations and those of the submitted results, allowing the participants to better understand the performance of their system. The resources, evaluation tools and visualisation tool are provided freely for research purposes and can be found at http://sites.google.com/site/bionlpst/