Biomedical Relation Extraction Using Dependency Graph and Decoder-Enhanced Transformer Model

The identification of drug–drug and chemical–protein interactions is essential for understanding unpredictable changes in the pharmacological effects of drugs and mechanisms of diseases and developing therapeutic drugs. In this study, we extract drug-related interactions from the DDI (Drug–Drug Interaction) Extraction-2013 Shared Task dataset and the BioCreative ChemProt (Chemical–Protein) dataset using various transfer transformers. We propose BERT(GAT) that uses a graph attention network (GAT) to take into account the local structure of sentences and embedding features of nodes under the self-attention scheme and investigate whether incorporating syntactic structure can help relation extraction. In addition, we suggest T5(slim_dec), which adapts the autoregressive generation task of the T5 (text-to-text transfer transformer) to the relation classification problem by removing the self-attention layer in the decoder block. Furthermore, we evaluated the potential of biomedical relation extraction of GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) using GPT-3 variant models. As a result, T5(slim_dec), which is a model with a tailored decoder designed for classification problems within the T5 architecture, demonstrated very promising performances for both tasks. We achieved an accuracy of 91.15% in the DDI dataset and an accuracy of 94.29% for the CPR (Chemical–Protein Relation) class group in ChemProt dataset. However, BERT(GAT) did not show a significant performance improvement in the aspect of relation extraction. We demonstrated that transformer-based approaches focused only on relationships between words are implicitly eligible to understand language well without additional knowledge such as structural information.