Enriching contextualized language model from knowledge graph for biomedical information extraction.

Journal: Briefings in bioinformatics
Published Date:

Abstract

Biomedical information extraction (BioIE) is an important task. The aim is to analyze biomedical texts and extract structured information such as named entities and semantic relations between them. In recent years, pre-trained language models have largely improved the performance of BioIE. However, they neglect to incorporate external structural knowledge, which can provide rich factual information to support the underlying understanding and reasoning for biomedical information extraction. In this paper, we first evaluate current extraction methods, including vanilla neural networks, general language models and pre-trained contextualized language models on biomedical information extraction tasks, including named entity recognition, relation extraction and event extraction. We then propose to enrich a contextualized language model by integrating a large scale of biomedical knowledge graphs (namely, BioKGLM). In order to effectively encode knowledge, we explore a three-stage training procedure and introduce different fusion strategies to facilitate knowledge injection. Experimental results on multiple tasks show that BioKGLM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art extraction models. A further analysis proves that BioKGLM can capture the underlying relations between biomedical knowledge concepts, which are crucial for BioIE.

Authors

  • Hao Fei
    School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China.
  • Yafeng Ren
    Guangdong Collaborative Innovation Center for Language Research & Services, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, 510420, Guangdong, China.
  • Yue Zhang
    Department of Ophthalmology, Beijing Hospital, National Center of Gerontology, Institute of Geriatric Medicine, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing, China.
  • Donghong Ji
    School of Computer, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China. dhji@whu.edu.cn.
  • Xiaohui Liang
    Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA, United States.