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Motivation: The scientific literature embeds an enormous amount of relational knowledge, encompassing interactions between biomedical entities, like proteins, drugs, and symptoms. To cope with the ever-increasing number of publications, researchers are experiencing a surge of interest in extracting valuable, structured, concise, and unambiguous information from plain texts. With the development of deep learning, the granularity of information extraction is evolving from entities and pairwise relations to events. Events can model complex interactions involving multiple participants having a specific semantic role, also handling nested and overlapping definitions. After being studied for years, automatic event extraction is on the road to significantly impact biology in a wide range of applications, from knowledge base enrichment to the formulation of new research hypotheses. Results: This paper provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey on the link between event extraction and natural language understanding, focusing on the biomedical domain. First, we establish a flexible event definition, summarizing the terminological efforts conducted in various areas. Second, we present the event extraction task, the related challenges, and the available annotated corpora. Third, we deeply explore the most representative methods and present an analysis of the current state-of-the-art, accompanied by performance discussion. To help researchers navigate the avalanche of event extraction works, we provide a detailed taxonomy for classifying the contributions proposed by the community. Fourth, we compare solutions applied in biomedicine with those evaluated in other domains, identifying research opportunities and providing insights for strategies not yet explored. Finally, we discuss applications and our envisions about future perspectives, moving the needle on explainability and knowledge injection.

Knowledge modelling techniques based on knowledge graphs can be used in the context of building customized and flexible e-learning systems to provide learning resources that are accessible to anyone, including learners with special needs and accessibility preferences. The paper describes how a personalized educational resource system that considers the needs of learners, especially when it comes to learners with accessibility needs, can benefit from knowledge graph-based technologies used as resource representation formalism. Knowledge graphs can be used to provide learners with suitable learning objects, learning activities, and teaching methods based on their different preferences and needs and to perform domain knowledge reasoning through modelled domain knowledge.

The design and construction of personalized and flexible e-learning systems can benefit from the use of sophisticated knowledge modeling and data-analysis techniques to provide learning resources that are accessible by anyone, including learners with special accessibility needs and preferences. The paper describes a personalized educational resources system that considers learner's needs, especially when it comes to learners with accessibility requirements. We use Semantic Web technologies as resource representation formalism to provide learners with suitable learning objects, learning activities, and teaching methods based on their different preferences and needs. The system supports the creation of interactive semantic queries to bring the result sets closer to user research requirements.