Knowledge Guided Attention and Graph Convolutional Networks for Chemical-Disease Relation Extraction

Biomedical event causal relation extraction with deep knowledge fusion and Roberta-based data augmentation

Biomedical event causal relation extraction (BECRE), as a subtask of biomedical information extraction, aims to extract event causal relation facts from unstructured biomedical texts and plays an essential role in many downstream tasks. The existing works have two main problems: i) Only shallow features are limited in helping the model establish potential relationships between biomedical events. ii) Using the traditional oversampling method to solve the data imbalance problem of the BECRE tasks ignores the requirements for data diversifying. This paper proposes a novel biomedical event causal relation extraction method to solve the above problems using deep knowledge fusion and Roberta-based data augmentation. To address the first problem, we fuse deep knowledge, including structural event representation and entity relation path, for establishing potential semantic connections between biomedical events. We use the Graph Convolutional Neural network (GCN) and the predicated tensor model to acquire structural event representation, and entity relation paths are encoded based on the external knowledge bases (GTD, CDR, CHR, GDA and UMLS). We introduce the triplet attention mechanism to fuse structural event representation and entity relation path information. Besides, this paper proposes the Roberta-based data augmentation method to address the second problem, some words of biomedical text, except biomedical events, are masked proportionally and randomly, and then pre-trained Roberta generates data instances for the imbalance BECRE dataset. Extensive experimental results on Hahn-Powell's and BioCause datasets confirm that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to current advances.

MMR: A Multi-view Merge Representation model for Chemical-Disease relation extraction

Chemical-Disease relation (CDR) extraction aims to identify the semantic relations between chemical and disease entities in the unstructured biomedical document, which provides a basis for downstream tasks such as clinical medical diagnosis and drug discovery. Compared with general domain relation extraction, it needs a more effective representation of the whole document due to the specialized nature of texts in the biomedical domain, including the biomedical entity and entity-pair representation. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-view Merge Representation (MMR) model to thoroughly capture entity and entity-pair representation of the document. First, we utilize prior knowledge and a pre-trained transformer encoder to capture entity semantic representation. Then we employ the U-Net layer and Graph Convolution Network layer to capture global entity-pair representation. Finally, we get a specific merged representation for each entity pair to be classified. We evaluate our model on the CDR dataset published by the BioCreative-V community and achieve a state-of-the-art result.

Entity relationship extraction from Chinese electronic medical records based on feature augmentation and cascade binary tagging framework

Extracting entity relations from unstructured Chinese electronic medical records is an important task in medical information extraction. However, Chinese electronic medical records mostly have document-level volumes, and existing models are either unable to handle long text sequences or exhibit poor performance. This paper proposes a neural network based on feature augmentation and cascade binary tagging framework. First, we utilize a pre-trained model to tokenize the original text and obtain word embedding vectors. Second, the word vectors are fed into the feature augmentation network and fused with the original features and position features. Finally, the cascade binary tagging decoder generates the results. In the current work, we built a Chinese document-level electronic medical record dataset named VSCMeD, which contains 595 real electronic medical records from vascular surgery patients. The experimental results show that the model achieves a precision of 87.82% and recall of 88.47%. It is also verified on another Chinese medical dataset CMeIE-V2 that the model achieves a precision of 54.51% and recall of 48.63%.

iGRLCDA: identifying circRNA-disease association based on graph representation learning

While the technologies of ribonucleic acid-sequence (RNA-seq) and transcript assembly analysis have continued to improve, a novel topology of RNA transcript was uncovered in the last decade and is called circular RNA (circRNA). Recently, researchers have revealed that they compete with messenger RNA (mRNA) and long noncoding for combining with microRNA in gene regulation. Therefore, circRNA was assumed to be associated with complex disease and discovering the relationship between them would contribute to medical research. However, the work of identifying the association between circRNA and disease in vitro takes a long time and usually without direction. During these years, more and more associations were verified by experiments. Hence, we proposed a computational method named identifying circRNA-disease association based on graph representation learning (iGRLCDA) for the prediction of the potential association of circRNA and disease, which utilized a deep learning model of graph convolution network (GCN) and graph factorization (GF). In detail, iGRLCDA first derived the hidden feature of known associations between circRNA and disease using the Gaussian interaction profile (GIP) kernel combined with disease semantic information to form a numeric descriptor. After that, it further used the deep learning model of GCN and GF to extract hidden features from the descriptor. Finally, the random forest classifier is introduced to identify the potential circRNA-disease association. The five-fold cross-validation of iGRLCDA shows strong competitiveness in comparison with other excellent prediction models at the gold standard data and achieved an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.9289 and an area under the precision-recall curve of 0.9377. On reviewing the prediction results from the relevant literature, 22 of the top 30 predicted circRNA-disease associations were noted in recent published papers. These exceptional results make us believe that iGRLCDA can provide reliable circRNA-disease associations for medical research and reduce the blindness of wet-lab experiments.