Background
Protein interaction networks are expensive to construct experimentally. Therefore, researchers usually refer to the literature or domain-specific databases to convey knowledge on currently known interactions. Yet the task of manual collection of knowledge from scientific papers is labor intensive, and therefore should be automated to the extent possible. For this, an important step is identifying gene and protein names (termed entities). After identification, gene names must be mapped to database identifiers to connect them to structured knowledge. One particular problem in this step are homonymous, i.e., identical names referring to different genes in different species.