Biomedical Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction: Methodologies, Challenges & Opportunities

With the volume of biomedical literature currently increasing at an unparalleled rate, researchers in biomedical sciences are quickly losing the capacity to single-handedly grasp the available information in a diversity of domains. However, owing to the growing body of available texts and open-access policies of an increasing number of publishers, Information Extraction (IE) in the biomedical domain is becoming an important task to aid in the condensation and systematization of scientific information in subject-specific areas and ideally reduce the burden of manual literature research in the biomedical scope. The present manuscript aims to provide a comprehensive survey on the tasks of Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (BioNER) and Biomedical Relation Extraction (BioRE), namely in terms of their evolution, current common methodologies, existing resources, and the challenges and opportunities they provide. Finally, a few possible routes for the development of Biomedical IE are also discussed.