ChEMU 2021: Reaction Reference Resolution and Anaphora Resolution in Chemical Patents

Chemical patents serve as an indispensable source of information about new discoveries of chemical compounds. The ChEMU (Cheminformatics Elsevier Melbourne University) lab addresses information extraction over chemical patents, and aims to advance the state of the art on this topic. ChEMU lab 2021, as part of the 12th Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF-2021), will be the second ChEMU lab. ChEMU 2021 will provide two distinct tasks related to reference resolution in chemical patents. Task 1—Chemical Reaction Reference Resolution—focuses on paragraph-level references and aims to identify the chemical reactions or general conditions specified in one reaction description referred to by another. Task 2—Anaphora Resolution—focuses on expression-level references and aims to identify the reference relationships between expressions in chemical reaction descriptions. In this paper, we introduce ChEMU 2021, including its motivation, goals, tasks, resources, and evaluation framework.