Exploring relationship between emotion and probiotics with knowledge graphs.

Purpose: Researchers have identified gut microbiota that interact with brain regions associated with emotion and mood. Literature reviews of those associations rely on rigorous systematic approaches and labor-intensive investments. Here we explore how knowledge graph, a large scale semantic network consisting of entities and concepts as well as the semantic relationships among them, is incorporated into the emotion-probiotic relationship exploration work. Method: We propose an end-to-end emotion-probiotics relationship exploration method with an integrated medical knowledge graph, which incorporates the text mining output of knowledge graph, concept reasoning and evidence classification. Specifically, a knowledge graph for probiotics is built based on a text-mining analysis of PubMed, and further used to retrieve triples of relationships with reasoning logistics. Then specific relationships are annotated and evidence levels are retrieved to form a new evidence-based emotion-probiotic knowledge graph. Results: Based on the probiotics knowledge graph with 40,442,404 triples, totally 1453 PubMed articles were annotated in both the title level and abstract level, and the evidence levels were incorporated to the visualization of the explored emotion-probiotic relationships. Finally, we got 4131 evidenced emotion-probiotic associations. Conclusions: The evidence-based emotion-probiotic knowledge graph construction work demonstrates an effective reasoning based pipeline of relationship exploration. The annotated relationship associations are supposed be used to help researchers generate scientific hypotheses or create their own semantic graphs for their research interests.