Neural Dependency Parsing of Biomedical Text: TurkuNLP entry in the CRAFT Structural Annotation Task

We present the approach taken by the TurkuNLP group in the CRAFT Structural Annotation task, a shared task on dependency parsing. Our approach builds primarily on the Turku neural parser, a native dependency parser that ranked among the best in the recent CoNLL tasks on parsing Universal Dependencies. To adapt the parser to the biomedical domain, we considered and evaluated a number of approaches, including the generation of custom word embeddings, combination with other in-domain resources, and the incorporation of information from named entity recognition. We achieved a labeled attachment score of 89.7%, the best result among task participants.