Reusing label functions to extract multiple types of biomedical relationships from biomedical abstracts at scale

Knowledge bases support multiple research efforts such as providing contextual information for biomedical entities, constructing networks, and supporting the interpretation of high-throughput analyses. Some knowledge bases are automatically constructed, but most are populated via some form of manual curation. Manual curation is time consuming and difficult to scale in the context of an increasing publication rate. A recently described “data programming” paradigm seeks to circumvent this arduous process by combining distant supervision with simple rules and heuristics written as labeling functions that can be automatically applied to inputs. Unfortunately writing useful label functions requires substantial error analysis and is a nontrivial task: in early efforts to use data programming we found that producing each label function could take a few days. Producing a biomedical knowledge base with multiple node and edge types could take hundreds or possibly thousands of label functions. In this paper we sought to evaluate the extent to which label functions could be re-used across edge types. We used a subset of Hetionet v1 that centered on disease, compound, and gene nodes to evaluate this approach. We compared a baseline distant supervision model with the same distant supervision resources added to edge-type-specific label functions, edge-type-mismatch label functions, and all label functions. We confirmed that adding additional edge-type-specific label functions improves performance. We also found that adding one or a few edge-type-mismatch label functions nearly always improved performance. Adding a large number of edge-type-mismatch label functions produce variable performance that depends on the edge type being predicted and the label function’s edge type source. Lastly, we show that this approach, even on this subgraph of Hetionet, could add new edges to Hetionet v1 with high confidence. We expect that practical use of this strategy would include additional filtering and scoring methods which would further enhance precision.