Implementation of Knowledge-Based Graph Neural Networks for Reasoning and Ranking Medical Entities from CORD-19 Texts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56741/jnest.v4i02.1049Keywords:
Biomedical Information Retrieval, Graph Neural Networks, Knowledge Graph, Named Entity Recognition, CORD-19Abstract
The rapid growth of biomedical literature, espe- cially during the COVID-19 pandemic, has introduced new challenges in retrieving clinically relevant information using conventional search methods. This study proposes a novel, interpretable framework for biomedical information retrieval that integrates Named Entity Recognition (NER), knowledge graph construction, and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to support semantic reasoning and entity-level ranking. Unlike prior biomedical retrieval systems that operate at document level or perform link prediction over KGs, our framework introduces a novel task formulation contextual entity-level ranking powered by graph-based semantic reasoning. Leveraging the CORD-19 dataset, the system filters abstracts based on user queries, extracts domain-specific entities using SciSpacy, and constructs a semantic graph that captures co-occurrence relationships among medical concepts. A Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is then employed to prop- agate relevance signals across the graph, enabling context- aware entity ranking. Experimental evaluations using queries such as ”pneumonia” and ”cough” demonstrate superior performance over traditional IR baselines like TF-IDF and BM25, achieving a Mean Average Precision (MAP) of 0.95 and Precision@3 of 1.00. The results confirm the system’s effectiveness in identifying semantically meaningful biomed- ical entities while offering enhanced transparency through graph-based visualizations. This work contributes a scalable and extensible approach to biomedical search and lays the foundation for intelligent literature exploration in medical research and clinical decision support.
Downloads
References
G. Salton and C. Buckley, “Term-weighting approaches in auto- matic text retrieval,” Tech. Rep., 1988. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/0306-4573(88)90021-0
S. Robertson and H. Zaragoza, “The probabilistic relevance frame- work: Bm25 and beyond,” Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval, vol. 3, pp. 333–389, 2009. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1561/1500000019
T. N. Kipf and M. Welling, “Semi-supervised classification with graph convolutional networks,” 9 2016. [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.02907
E. Zhang, N. Gupta, R. Tang, X. Han, R. Pradeep, K. Lu, Y. Zhang, R. Nogueira, K. Cho, H. Fang, and J. Lin, “Covidex: Neural ranking models and keyword search infrastructure for the covid-19 open research dataset,” 7 2020. [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/2007.07846 DOI: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.sdp-1.5
M. Zitnik, M. Agrawal, and J. Leskovec, “Modeling polypharmacy side effects with graph convolutional networks,” 2 2018. [Online]. Available:http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.00543http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ bioinformatics/bty294 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/258814
C. Gao, S. Yin, H. Wang, Z. Wang, Z. Du, and X. Li, “Medical- knowledge-based graph neural network for medication combination prediction,” IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, vol. 35, pp. 13 246–13 257, 10 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TNNLS.2023.3266490
V. N. Ioannidis, D. Zheng, and G. Karypis, “Few-shot link prediction via graph neural networks for covid-19 drug- repurposing,” 7 2020. [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/2007.10261
R. Zhang, D. Hristovski, D. Schutte, A. Kastrin, M. Fiszman, and H. Kilicoglu, “Drug repurposing for covid-19 via knowledge graph completion,” 10 2020. [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/ abs/2010.09600http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2021.103696 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2021.103696
X. Huang, J. Zhang, Z. Xu, L. Ou, and J. Tong, “A knowledge graph based question answering method for medical domain,” PeerJ Computer Science, vol. 7, pp. 1–19, 9 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.667
P. Wang and Y. Hu, “Matching biomedical ontologies via a hybrid graph attention network,” Frontiers in Genetics, vol. 13, 7 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2022.893409
S. Basu, S. Chakraborty, A. Hassan, S. Siddique, and A. Anand, “ERLKG: Entity representation learning and knowledge graph based association analysis of COVID-19 through mining of unstructured biomedical corpora,” in Proceedings of the First Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing, M. K. Chandrasekaran, A. de Waard, G. Feigenblat, D. Freitag, T. Ghosal, E. Hovy, P. Knoth, D. Konopnicki, P. Mayr, R. M. Patton, and M. Shmueli-Scheuer, Eds. Online: Association for Computational Linguistics, Nov. 2020, pp. 127–137. [Online]. Available: https://aclanthology.org/2020.sdp-1.15/ DOI: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.sdp-1.15
P. Bhatia, L. Liu, K. Arumae, N. Pourdamghani, S. Deshpande, B. Snively, M. Mona, C. Wise, G. Price, S. Ramaswamy, X. Ma, R. Nallapati, Z. Huang, B. Xiang, and T. Kass-Hout, “Aws cord-19 search: A neural search engine for covid-19 literature,” 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.amazon.science/publications/ aws-cord-19-search-a-neural-search-engine-for-covid-19-literature DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93080-6_11
A. Onan, “Hierarchical graph-based text classification framework with contextual node embedding and bert-based dynamic fusion,” Journal of King Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences, vol. 35, no. 7, p. 101610, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1319157823001647 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2023.101610
Q. Chen, A. Allot, and Z. Lu, “Litcovid: An open database of covid- 19 literature,” Nucleic Acids Research, vol. 49, pp. D1534–D1540, 1 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaa952
I. Beltagy, K. Lo, and A. Cohan, “Scibert: A pretrained language model for scientific text,” Tech. Rep. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/google-research/
Q. Jin, B. Dhingra, Z. Liu, W. W. Cohen, and X. Lu, “Pubmedqa: A dataset for biomedical research question answering,” 9 2019. [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06146 DOI: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D19-1259
K. Xue, Y. Zhou, Z. Ma, T. Ruan, H. Zhang, and P. He, “Fine- tuning bert for joint entity and relation extraction in chinese medical text,” in 2019 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), 2019, pp. 892–897. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/BIBM47256.2019.8983370
K. McCoy, S. Gudapati, L. He, E. Horlander, D. Kartchner,S. Kulkarni, N. Mehra, J. Prakash, H. Thenot, S. V. Vanga, A. Wag- ner, B. White, and C. S. Mitchell, “Biomedical text link prediction for drug discovery: A case study with covid-19,” Pharmaceutics, vol. 13, 6 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/pharmaceutics13060794
K. Soman, P. W. Rose, J. H. Morris, R. E. Akbas, B. Smith, B. Peetoom, C. Villouta-Reyes, G. Cerono, Y. Shi, A. Rizk-Jackson, S. Israni, C. A. Nelson, S. Huang, and S. E. Baranzini, “Biomedical knowledge graph-optimized prompt generation for large language models,” Bioinformatics, vol. 40, no. 9, p. btae560, 09 2024. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btae560 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btae560
D. Zhang, S. Mohan, M. Torkar, and A. Mccallum, “A distant supervision corpus for extracting biomedical relationships between chemicals, diseases and genes,” 04 2022.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
Categories
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Journal of Novel Engineering Science and Technology

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.






















