Evidence map›Paper›PMID 40543734›Full record

ArticleJournal of biomedical informatics2025

Ontology enrichment using a large language model: Applying lexical, semantic, and knowledge network-based similarity for concept placement.

Navya Martin Kollapally, James Geller, Vipina Kuttichi Keloth, Zhe He, Julia Xu

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of biomedical informatics, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
1citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

1 citing paper in PubMed.

  1. Large Language Models in Bio-Ontology Research: A Review.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025
    Review
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

5 authors.

Navya Martin KollapallyKean University, United States. Electronic address: nmartink@kean.edu.
James GellerNew Jersey Institute of Technology, United States.
Vipina Kuttichi KelothYale University, United States.
Zhe HeFlorida State University, United States.
Julia XuJX Consulting, United States.

Funding

New Jersey Alliance for Clinical Translational Science: NJ ACTSUL1TR003017 · NCATS · RUTGERS BIOMEDICAL/HEALTH SCIENCES-RBHS · PI PANETTIERI, REYNOLD ALEXANDER · 2019 to 2023
$28.9M
Prediction of Health Outcomes and Adverse Events in Pediatric Organ Transplantation in FloridaR21LM013911 · NLM · FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY · PI HE, ZHE, KILLIAN, MICHAEL · 2022 to 2023
$395k
AHRQ HHS R21 HS029969NCATS NIH HHS UL1 TR003017NLM NIH HHS R21 LM013911
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

objectiveOntologies are essential for representing the knowledge of a domain. To make ontologies useful, they must encompass a comprehensive domain view. To achieve ontology enrichment, there is a need to discover new concepts to be added, either because they were missed in the first place, or the state-of-the-art has advanced to develop new real-world concepts. Our goal is to develop an automatic enrichment pipeline using a seed ontology, a Large Language Model (LLM), and source of text. The pipeline is applied to the domain of Social Determinants of Health (SDoH), using PubMed as a source of concepts. In this work, the applicability and effectiveness of the enrichment pipeline is demonstrated by extending the SDoH Ontology called SOHOv1, however our methodology could be used in other domains as well.

methodsWe first retrieved PubMed abstracts of candidate articles with existing SOHOv1 concepts as search terms. Next, we used GPT-4-1201 to extract semantic triples from the abstracts. We identified concepts from these triples utilizing lexical, semantic, and knowledge network-based filtering. We also compared the granularity of semantic triples extracted with our method to the triples in the SemMedDB (Semantic MEDLINE Database). The results were evaluated by human experts and standard ontology tools for checking consistency and semantic correctness.

resultsWe expanded SOHOv1, which contained 173 concepts and 585 axioms, including 207 logical axioms to SOHOv2, which contains 572 concepts, 1,542 axioms, including 725 logical axioms. Our methods identified more concepts than those extracted from SemMedDB for the same task. While we have shown the feasibility of our approach for an SDoH ontology, the methodology is generalizable to other ontologies with an existing seed ontology and text corpus.

conclusionsThe contributions of this work are: Extracting semantic triples from PubMed abstracts using GPT-4-1201 utilizing prompt chaining; showing the superiority of triples from GPT-4-1201 over triples from SemMedDB for SDoH; using lexical and semantic similarity search techniques with knowledge network-based search to identify the concepts to be added to the ontology; confirming the quality of the new concepts with human experts.

Indexed as

Biological OntologiesLanguageNatural Language ProcessingSemanticsHumansLarge Language ModelsPubMedLarge language modelOntology enrichmentOntology evaluationSemantic MEDLINESemantic MEDLINE databaseSemMedDB databaseSimilarity searchSocial determinants of health

Identifiers

PMID40543734
PMCPMC12371725

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.