Knowledge graph based platform of COVID-19 drugs and symptoms

Zhenhe Pan, Shuang Jiang, Juntao Su, Muzhe Guo, Yuanlin Zhang

Abstract: Since the first cased of COVID-19 was identified in December 2019, a plethora of different drugs have been tested for COVID-19 treatment, making it a daunting task to keep track of the rapid growth of COVID-19 research landscape. Using the existing scientific literature search systems to develop a deeper understanding of COVID-19 related clinical experiments and results turns to be increasingly complicated. In this paper, we build a named entity recognition-based framework to extract information accurately and generate knowledge graph efficiently from a myriad of clinical test results articles. Of the tested drugs to treat COVID-19, we also develop a question answering system answers to medical questions regarding COVID-19 related symptoms using Wikipedia articles. We combine the state-of-the-art question answering model - Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), with Knowledge Graph to answer patients' questions about treatment options for their symptoms. This generated knowledge graph is user-friendly with intuitive and convenient tools to find the supporting and/or contradictory references of certain drugs with properties such as side effects, target population, etc. The trained question answering platform provides a straightforward and error-tolerant way to query for treatment suggestions given uses' input symptoms.