We introduce a generic, human-out-of-the-loop pipeline, ERLKG, to perform rapid association analysis of any biomedical entity with other existing entities from a corpora of the same domain. Our pipeline consists of a Knowledge Graph (KG) created from the Open Source CORD-19 dataset by fully automating the procedure of information extraction using SciBERT. The best latent entity representations are then found by benchnmarking different KG embedding techniques on the task of link prediction using a Graph Convolution Network Auto Encoder (GCN-AE). We demonstrate the utility of ERLKG with respect to COVID-19 through multiple qualitative evaluations. Due to the lack of a gold standard, we propose a relatively large intrinsic evaluation dataset for COVID-19 and use it for validating the top two performing KG embedding techniques. We find TransD to be the best performing KG embedding technique with Pearson and Spearman correlation scores of 0.4348 and 0.4570 respectively. We demonstrate that a considerable number of ERLKG’s top protein, chemical and disease predictions are currently in consideration for COVID-19 related research.

Relation classification is crucial for inferring semantic relatedness between entities in a piece of text. These systems can be trained given labelled data. However, relation classification is very domain-specific and it takes a lot of effort to label data for a new domain. In this paper, we explore domain adaptation techniques for this task. While past works have focused on single source domain adaptation for bio-medical relation classification, we classify relations in an unlabeled target domain by transferring useful knowledge from one or more related source domains. Our experiments with the model have shown to improve state-of-the-art F1 score on 3 benchmark biomedical corpora for single domain and on 2 out of 3 for multi-domain scenarios. When used with contextualized embeddings, there is further boost in performance outperforming neural-network based domain adaptation baselines for both the cases.