The training data used in the task came from the GENIA version 3.02 corpus, This was formed from a controlled search on MEDLINE using the MeSH terms "human", "blood cells" and "transcription factors". From this search, 1,999 abstracts were selected and hand annotated according to a small taxonomy of 48 classes based on a chemical classification. Among the classes, 36 terminal classes were used to annotate the GENIA corpus. For the shared task only the classes protein, DNA, RNA, cell line and cell type were used. The first three incorporate several subclasses from the original taxonomy while the last two are interesting in order to make the task realistic for post-processing by a potential template filling application. The publication year of the training set ranges over 1990~1999.