The research team from the Intelligent Agent System Lab (IASL), IIS, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, led by Prof. Wen-Lian Hsu, and from Prof. Richard Tzong-Han Tsai's Intelligent Information Research Service Lab (IISR) at the Dep. of Computer Science & Engineering, Yuang Ze Univ., won the first place in the BioCreAtIvE II.5 Interactor Normalization Task Challenge, held in Madrid, Spain in 2009.

This Challenge is to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art computer programs for the task of normalizing gene and gene product names in a corpus of full text articles. This task is an important step toward identifying protein-protein interaction in biomedical texts. The IASL-IISR team employed a high recall memory-based gene normalization (GN) approach, optimized for processing full text article, and a support vector machine based ranking method to achieve their top score.

IASL-IISR team members: H.J. Dai, P.T. Lai, C.H. Huang, Y.C. Chang, Y.Y. Bow, H.T. Wu, Prof. Richard T.H. Tsai, and Prof. W.L. Hsu.