MINT and IntAct contribute to the second BioCreative challenge: serving the text-mining community with high quality molecular interaction data

In the absence of consolidated pipelines to archive biological data electronically, information dispersed in the literature must be captured by manual annotation. Unfortunately, manual annotation is time consuming and the coverage of published interaction data is therefore far from complete. The use of text-mining tools to identify relevant publications and to assist in the initial information extraction could help to improve the efficiency of the curation process and, as a consequence, the database coverage of data available in the literature. The 2006 BioCreative competition was aimed at evaluating text-mining procedures in comparison with manual annotation of protein-protein interactions.