LAUSR

Most of the biomedical knowledge the research community has acquired during the past few decades has been deposited in scientific literature as unstructured text. Converting the unstructured text into the structured form will enable novel methodologies and applications for scientific discovery that can fully harness the power of the existing knowledge. To this end, two fundamental questions need to be addressed: named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE). NER deals with identifying the concepts or entities in texts, such as diseases, genes/proteins, chemical compounds, etc. while RE aims to extract the relations among these entities. Together, the extracted information forms a knowledge graph (KG) where the nodes are entities in the texts and the edges represent their relationships. KGs can link concepts within existing research to allow researchers to find connections that may have been difficult to discover without them. The LitCoin Natural Language Processing (NLP) Challenge was recently organized by NCATS of NIH and NASA to spur innovation by rewarding the most creative and high-impact uses of biomedical text to create KGs. Our team participated in the challenge and ranked first place. We have applied the methods we developed for the LitCoin NLP challenge to all PubMed abstracts and constructed the largest-scale biomedical KG to date. We show that powerful and versatile query functions can be implemented on top of the KG to enable highly specific and accurate knowledge retrieval and inference of causal and indirect relationships. Citation Format: Xin Sui, Yuan Zhang, Feng Pan, Donghu Sun, Menghan Chung, Jinfeng Zhang. Constructing the largest-scale knowledge graph using all PubMed abstracts and its application for highly specific and accurate knowledge retrieval. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 5421.