Figure 2.

Comparison of precision and accuracy of the algorithms. The conditional random fields (CRF) algorithm considerably outperforms other approaches for identifying human protein names in Medline abstracts, such as the simple matching of words to a dictionary of protein names, as well as the other available protein name-tagging algorithms in [32], Kex [34] and Abgene [35]. The tests are performed on 200 manually annotated Medline abstracts [33]. The precision (the number of correct protein names among all identified names) in identifying proteins is plotted against the recall (the number of correct protein names among all possible correct protein names). Higher scores on both precision and recall are preferable; however, for this purpose, we seek to maximize precision and can tolerate lower recall.