BACKGROUND: The rapid publication of important research in the biomedical 
literature makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to keep current with 
significant work in their area of interest.
RESULTS: This paper reports a scalable method for the discovery of 
protein-protein interactions in Medline abstracts, using a combination of text 
analytics, statistical and graphical analysis, and a set of easily implemented 
rules. Applying these techniques to 12,300 abstracts, a precision of 0.61 and a 
recall of 0.97 were obtained, (f = 0.74) and when allowing for two-hop and 
three-hop relations discovered by graphical analysis, the precision was 0.74 (f 
= 0.83).
CONCLUSION: This combination of linguistic and statistical approaches appears to 
provide the highest precision and recall thus far reported in detecting 
protein-protein relations using text analytic approaches.