The vast amount of data published in the primary biomedical literature represents a challenge for the automated extraction and codification of individual data elements. Biological databases that rely solely on manual extraction by expert curators are unable to comprehensively annotate the information dispersed across the entire biomedical literature. The development of efficient tools based on natural language processing (NLP) systems is essential for the selection of relevant publications, identification of data attributes and partially automated annotation. One of the tasks of the Biocreative 2010 Challenge III was devoted to the evaluation of NLP systems developed to identify articles for curation and extraction of protein-protein interaction (PPI) data.