Computational Literature-based Discovery for Natural Products Research: Current State and Future Prospects

Literature-based discovery (LBD) mines existing literature in order to generate new hypotheses by finding links between previously disconnected pieces of knowledge. Although automated LBD systems are becoming widespread and indispensable in a wide variety of knowledge domains, little has been done to introduce LBD to the field of natural products research. Despite growing knowledge in the natural product domain, most of the accumulated information is found in detached data pools. LBD can facilitate better contextualization and exploitation of this wealth of data, for example by formulating new hypotheses for natural product research, especially in the context of drug discovery and development. Moreover, automated LBD systems promise to accelerate the currently tedious and expensive process of lead identification, optimization, and development. Focusing on natural product research, we briefly reflect the development of automated LBD and summarize its methods and principal data sources. In a thorough review of published use cases of LBD in the biomedical domain, we highlight the immense potential of this data mining approach for natural product research, especially in context with drug discovery or repurposing, mode of action, as well as drug or substance interactions. Most of the 91 natural product-related discoveries in our sample of reported use cases of LBD were addressed at a computer science audience. Therefore, it is the wider goal of this review to introduce automated LBD to researchers who work with natural products and to facilitate the dialogue between this community and the developers of automated LBD systems.

Indirect association and ranking hypotheses for literature based discovery

BACKGROUND

Literature Based Discovery (LBD) produces more potential hypotheses than can be manually reviewed, making automatically ranking these hypotheses critical. In this paper, we introduce the indirect association measures of Linking Term Association (LTA), Minimum Weight Association (MWA), and Shared B to C Set Association (SBC), and compare them to Linking Set Association (LSA), concept embeddings vector cosine, Linking Term Count (LTC), and direct co-occurrence vector cosine. Our proposed indirect association measures extend traditional association measures to quantify indirect rather than direct associations while preserving valuable statistical properties.

RESULTS

We perform a comparison between several different hypothesis ranking methods for LBD, and compare them against our proposed indirect association measures. We intrinsically evaluate each method's performance using its ability to estimate semantic relatedness on standard evaluation datasets. We extrinsically evaluate each method's ability to rank hypotheses in LBD using a time-slicing dataset based on co-occurrence information, and another time-slicing dataset based on SemRep extracted-relationships. Precision and recall curves are generated by ranking term pairs and applying a threshold at each rank.

CONCLUSIONS

Results differ depending on the evaluation methods and datasets, but it is unclear if this is a result of biases in the evaluation datasets or if one method is truly better than another. We conclude that LTC and SBC are the best suited methods for hypothesis ranking in LBD, but there is value in having a variety of methods to choose from.

Chemotext: A Publicly Available Web Server for Mining Drug-Target-Disease Relationships in PubMed

Elucidation of the mechanistic relationships between drugs, their targets, and diseases is at the core of modern drug discovery research. Thousands of studies relevant to the drug-target-disease (DTD) triangle have been published and annotated in the Medline/PubMed database. Mining this database affords rapid identification of all published studies that confirm connections between vertices of this triangle or enable new inferences of such connections. To this end, we describe the development of Chemotext, a publicly available Web server that mines the entire compendium of published literature in PubMed annotated by Medline Subject Heading (MeSH) terms. The goal of Chemotext is to identify all known DTD relationships and infer missing links between vertices of the DTD triangle. As a proof-of-concept, we show that Chemotext could be instrumental in generating new drug repurposing hypotheses or annotating clinical outcomes pathways for known drugs. The Chemotext Web server is freely available at http://chemotext.mml.unc.edu .

Literature Based Discovery: Models, methods, and trends

OBJECTIVES

This paper provides an introduction and overview of literature based discovery (LBD) in the biomedical domain. It introduces the reader to modern and historical LBD models, key system components, evaluation methodologies, and current trends. After completion, the reader will be familiar with the challenges and methodologies of LBD. The reader will be capable of distinguishing between recent LBD systems and publications, and be capable of designing an LBD system for a specific application.

TARGET AUDIENCE

From biomedical researchers curious about LBD, to someone looking to design an LBD system, to an LBD expert trying to catch up on trends in the field. The reader need not be familiar with LBD, but knowledge of biomedical text processing tools is helpful.

SCOPE

This paper describes a unifying framework for LBD systems. Within this framework, different models and methods are presented to both distinguish and show overlap between systems. Topics include term and document representation, system components, and an overview of models including co-occurrence models, semantic models, and distributional models. Other topics include uninformative term filtering, term ranking, results display, system evaluation, an overview of the application areas of drug development, drug repurposing, and adverse drug event prediction, and challenges and future directions. A timeline showing contributions to LBD, and a table summarizing the works of several authors is provided. Topics are presented from a high level perspective. References are given if more detailed analysis is required.