Exact Subgraph Matching Algorithm

The subgraph matching problem (subgraph isomorphism) is NP-complete. We designed a simple exact subgraph matching (ESM) algorithm for dependency graphs using a backtracking approach. The total worst-case algorithm complexity is O(n^2 * k^n) where n is the number of vertices and k is the vertex degree.

We have demonstrated the successful usage of our algorithm in three biomedical relation and event extraction applications: BioNLP 2011 shared tasks on event extraction, Protein-Residue association detection and Protein-Protein interaction identification.

This Java implementation implements our ESM algorithm. See README file: https://sourceforge.net/projects/esmalgorithm/files/

If you use our ESM implementation to support academic research, please cite the following paper:

Haibin Liu, Vlado Keselj, and Christian Blouin. Exploring a Subgraph Matching Approach for Extracting Biological Events from Literature. Computational Intelligence, 2013.