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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Descriptive knowledge graph for explaining entity relationships

Abstract

dc:description

We propose DEER (Descriptive Knowledge Graph for Explaining Entity Relationships) – an open and informative form of modeling entity relationships. In DEER, relationships between entities are represented by free-text relation descriptions. For instance, the relationship between entities of machine learning and algorithm can be represented as “Machine learning explores the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data.” To construct DEER, we propose a self-supervised learning method to extract relation descriptions with the analysis of dependency patterns and generate relation descriptions with a transformer-based relation description synthesizing model, where no human labeling is required. Experiments demonstrate that our system can extract and generate high-quality relation descriptions for explaining entity relationships. The results suggest that we can build an open and informative knowledge graph without human annotation. We also present a novel system that automates the extraction or generation of informative and descriptive sentences from biomedical corpus and builds a descriptive knowledge graph to facilitate efficient search for relational knowledge. In contrast to previous search engines or exploration systems that retrieve unconnected passages, our system organizes descriptive sentences into a graph, enabling researchers to explore relationships between entities. Our system also includes a relation synthesis model that generates concise descriptive sentences from retrieved sentences, reducing the need for human reading effort. With our system, researchers can quickly obtain a high-level overview of directly related entities to a query entity (e.g., diseases treated by a chemical) or indirect connections between two entities (e.g., candidate drugs for treating a disease). This information can guide literature surveys and facilitate the discovery of potential research topics. Our system also speeds up the literature curation and drug repurposing process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system on the CORD-19 dataset, but it can be deployed on any biomedical corpus without manual adaptation.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
M.S.
Level thesis:degree_level
Thesis
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Computer Science
Grantor
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Year dc:date
2023

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Zhu, Kerui
Contributors dc:contributor
  • Chang, Kevin Chen-Chuan

Subjects

dc:subject × 2

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • Copyright 2023 Kerui Zhu
Language dc:language
en, eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120112

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Base URL
www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Zhu, Kerui. Descriptive knowledge graph for explaining entity relationships. Thesis thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2023. https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120112